First Impressions

I’ve just taken a look at Daylife, the new, shiny, Ajax-crazy news aggregation service backed by Michael Arrington , Dave Winer and other starry names.

When I first opened it, a very large, black shutter dropped down my screen like an impolite suggestion to get lost. Well, I’m made of sterner stuff and hung on in there … and I’m glad I did. Apart from the soft-soapy Ajax slimyness, this is a very interesting concept, usefully presented.

I haven’t looked at it in depth yet, but it seems to be following the distinct trend back to human intervention, i.e. editors, first picked up by Jason Calacanis at Netscape, but also followed here at Syntagma in our network magazine portals — for example, Allusionz.

Now, Daylife is a big operation and likely to get bigger, especially with the strength of its founding backers. It brings together the traditional magazine news format with cascades of Web technology. It could be the first real internet news purveyor offering a credible alternative to the mainstream offline, especially as it utilizes technology better and offers an API for news presentation on other sites. I believe Huffington Post already takes it.

Once I made some inroads into the strange, but kinda intuitive, navigation, I began to enjoy myself. The stories are good — Egypt and Israel topped the bill when I looked — and there’s lots of backup stories to explore. You can even make a choice of topics that interest you to personalize the presentation.

I’ve yet to get to grips with all of it, so I’m not going to go into detail at this stage, but you can be sure we’ll keep an eye on it.

Investor Michael Arrington has a different point of view, though :

“After quickly reviewing the launch product, I am unhappy to report that I am underwhelmed by what Daylife has to offer. … What makes Daylife stand out is not so much what it does well, but what’s been left out. There are no RSS feeds, … or comments … 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.”

This type of newsy site isn’t really suitable for RSS feeds, in my opinion — although they are coming. Try hooking up to the BBC feed and the threads come in batches of 30 or so at a time. Awesomely time-wasting. Feeds don’t always work on galloping aggregation sites unless there are lots of them for narrow niches. Then they become tiresomely complicated.

I think he’s wrong on the editing point too. Another machine-driven aggregation site is not what we need right now. I believe human choice will be a factor in the success of this type of operation in 2007. Online services need to get in touch with their human side if they are ever to match the print world for both quality and friendliness.

The most sensible comment comes from Steve Rubel : “Daylife may not be the most comprehensive news site on the web, but it’s a winner. It aggregates content in a compelling way that is easy to read. That’s something we sorely need in a world of limitless choices. ”

In the end, as ever, it’s not the pundits but the readers who will decide.

Update : There’s some very good discussion on this topic over at Techmeme.