Daylife: A Quick Review
Mike Arrington rips into Daylife today in his review on TechCrunch, even though he has made an investment into the company. I almost wonder if he is so negative because he has been accused of favoritism one time too many. Jeff Jarvis, also involved with the company, has a more even-handed review. Liz Gannes of Gigaom calls it a
meatier version of aggregators such as Google News, Topix.net, and Techmeme, offering tools for pivoting around information by story,
characters, time, popularity, photos, and quotes, in a wide range of news categories.
Funded by old media and new media alike — “roughly twice as many investors as it has employees,” says paidContent — the company is perhaps best known for the involvement of media guru Jeff Jarvis and media bogeyman Craig Newmark.
Daylife is basically a news aggregator. One of the facts that Arrington highlights is that it doesn’t feature an RSS feed. He likens it to “buying a car without a gas pedal,” a comparison I find ridiculously wrong. As a news site that wants to display the context of the news, an RSS feed is really not necessarily a good way of displaying information. The RSS feed for TechMeme, for example, isn’t very useful either.
I think a lot of the thinking about Daylife has to do with being canonical about what a Web 2.0 project should look like. Daylife is refreshingly different. No comments, no RSS, just a clean, simple interface to the browse the news as chosen by editors (gasp!).
I, for my part, appreciate that.
Instead of ripping into the Web 2.0-ishness of the site, here are some criticisms I have:
- World news tends to be mostly US news
- the opening flash page with the pictures is a nice idea, but looks too much like a flash intro movie and might lead lots of people to just click away in disgust (oh, and that picture of Negroponte looks a lot as if he just died)
- I like the quotes when looking at the articles, I don’t think the quotes on the front page add much
- I like the layout, though it would be nice if the shortcuts to the different sub-sections (World, Business, Science etc.) would always stay visible
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