New York based Daylife, a news aggregation site I invested in long, long ago, has finally launched. We first mentioned the company back in July. After quickly reviewing the launch product, I am unhappy to report that I am underwhelmed by what Daylife has to offer. Perhaps I am conflicted because I am close to the company, but in my opinion Daylife has failed to raise the bar and will not be a compelling offering for news junkies. The Daylife site is a well designed collection of news items from around the web, and they do a very good job of associating text and rich media content to other content. News collection is automated, although the stories that appear on the home page are chosen by human editors. It’s easy to find your self clicking around the site to related news items. DayLife also has a bookmark feature where interesting stories can be saved by users. But Daylife enters the market about a year after a slew of other competitors came out with their products. Gather.com, Inform.com, NewsVine and Topix all have competing products. Google News reigns over all of them. 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. To learn more about Daylife, take the tour here. → Read More
New York-based Daylife finally showed a hint of itself today via one sentence in a long post by Jeff Jarvis, who’s working with the company. He says “Daylife will gather, analyze, organize, and create a new, distributed platform for the world’s news.” I don’t know anything more about the company than what Jeff says, which is unusual for one reason: I’m an investor. I participated in an angel round of financing over a year ago (before TechCrunch) and the company has kept me completely in the dark as to when they’ll launch, feature set, etc. This is understandable given the conflict of interest that has arisen with TechCrunch since then. The screen mockups and demo I saw when I invested were impressive, although I’m sure they have very little to do with what is being launched over a year later. To be blunt – I have no idea how Daylife will compare to, say, Newsvine and Digg, two news companies I fawn over regularly. I eagerly await a glimpse of what they will launch, and will have someone else write about it on TechCrunch (as I did with Edgeio, a startup I co-founded). Dave Winer, another investor, also noticed Jeff’s post today and wrote briefly about it. → Read More
