Daylife, a New York-based news aggregator with personalization hooks, launched a few weeks ago to offer users another way to ingest the daily news. It brings a new fresh look to a news site. Daylife is backed by many, including bloggers Jeff Jarvis and Michael Arrington but they are not in love with the initial cut of the product. Arrington reported his disappointment by saying:
“What makes Daylife stand out is not so much what it does well, but what’s been left out. There are no RSS feeds, even for your bookmarked stuff. Even worse, there’s no ability for users to leave comments on articles, a feature that has been wildly successful at NewsVine and Topix. And the fact that the front page news is gathered by humans, instead of the algorithmically determined news at Digg, means the company will always have a higher cost of doing business.”
The absence of RSS feeds surprised me since Jeff Jarvis a strong supporter of syndication (i.e. did the keynote at the Syndicate conference in New York last May) was assisting the startup. However, Jeff has "No disagreement" that feeds should have been added by saying:
"Nature of a startup: some things get onto the boat at launch, others hitch the next ride. RSS was one of the last features to get delayed until a later release; it’s coming. I had subscribed to various of the test feeds and got addicted quickly, so I, too, am eager for them to come out."
So it sounds like they are coming soon and I would imagine the average Jane or Joe probably has not even realize RSS is missing. Regardless, Daylife offers some interesting views of the news including the view that Steve Rubel calls his favorite, the magazine cover feature shown below.
Luckily the product is still in beta, since when I searched for "web 2.0" I encountered a cryptic error message. You can see a screen-shot below of a starred “web 2.0” category. In time this category should pull in content related to this to
pic. It will be interesting to see Daylife evolve as it has introduced content personalization offerings within the application by allowing users to start content areas of interest. I just wonder if users think Daylife’s offering is compelling enough to add it to their daily online routine. To find out more information take the Daylife tour. Also check out the Daylife blog for future updates.
