Mike, your never going to see that investment back. Come on, no RSS feeds…

-Jeff O’Hara
http://blog.zemote.com

Right now I see Daylife as a news research tool instead of a news reader. Whereas Google News, etc. aggregate news the features of Daylife that I like include the ability to aggregate photos and quotes related to a story in addition to the articles themselves.

For example, just yesterday I was reading an article and wanted to see photos of it. Using Google News I have to head over to Google Image search and put in the news topic and hope that the image index has been updated since the news hit. With Daylife, it already showed all associated photos I needed right next to the story.

Hm….. so you don’t think this is a memetracker?

Interesting that there are four spaces here. Legacy news tracking sites (news.yahoo.com, news.google.com) .. their web 2.0 competition (NewsVine, Topix, etc), then the memediggers (reddit, digg), then the memetrackers( tailrank, etc).

Hm….

The lack of RSS feeds is lame, but its a good opportunity to talk up services like Dapper and OpenKapow that make RSS feeds out of other people’s content.

Mike,

Any updates on your other investment - edgeio? Alexa is showing flat growth for the past six months but I also read that it closed $5M Series A in October. Is the Alexa chart wrong (obviously it would not be the first time)?

Too little, too late.

The site’s crawling for me at the moment(launch day surge, I’m guessing). Looks interesting but I’m still a bit confused: I clicked on a news headline from Mercury Times and it took me to a page with dozens of other similar headlines. I just wanted to read the article.

-Zaid

mike arrignton….I saw your interview with guy kawasaki…..and you mentioned how you post about web 2.0 companies…but all I see on this blog your advertisement about the companies you invested in …or wherever you’re getting paid from….like the dude from (aohell)…I emailed you twice for the company I’m been working on day and nite but I didn’t hear a single word back from you….if you don’t like my idea/company fine but have some decency to let the person know.
thanks for your time.

Bad investment.

Hey,

It’s Mike’s site so he can blog about whatever he wants.

I’ve been trying to get him to do a write-up on my site for a while. Lesson is, dont rely solely on a blogger to market your site.

Regards,

CJ

Don’t want to be a heretic, but considering that RSS has yet to penetrate the broader population (if anything, usage is falling), why do people still see it as so incredibly vital to a site’s success?

It’s like buying a car without a gas pedal.

I have just posted (click my name) a good comparison btw Mike and Steve Rubel. Mike doesn’t love it, Steve thinks it’s a winner. Interesting difference of opinion btw two top writers.

I’m sure they’ll get around to having RSS eventually, but I don’t think the lack of feeds is such a big deal here. It seems like they are trying to build new ways to explore stories (I especially like the Covers page), and that UI would be lost in an RSS reader. It would become just like any other news site.

Mike - I generally agree with you, but I’d like to see an example of RSS functionality being make-or-break for an information site. I know it’s sacrosant to the (very) small group of 2.0 thought leaders, but beyond that?

YouTube, for example doesn’t have RSS (it does have an email-based “subscribe” feature) - and it seems to be doing alright.

Daylife reminds me of my early days online.

No, not the fun - the 300-baud modem. It’s not like buying a car without a gas pedal, it’s like buying a car without a way to release the emergency brake.

Mike:

What does it take to get a link around here?

Chris Tolles
http://www.topix.net

fixed

Very visual, which I like, but the human element I can get anywhere. No matter your opinion of the Drudgreport (ugly design, types of stories, etc) you can’t argue with their success. I visit daily. The lack of rss feeds isn’t bothersome to me.

The majority of news readers probably care less about RSS, and most likely don’t have time to read comments from other readers. Daylife is a leap forward in my opinion. Just because it doesn’t all the useless web 2.0 that half of the people here oogle over doesn’t mean it’s in any way less useful for most people.

I used to read the paper, then I tried using Digg and Google News, then I went back. I like to know my news is being organized by someone who knows what they’re doing, not a bunch of nerds on the internet.

Mike:

Thanks.

Nice writeup BTW, and given that you’re an investor, remarkably candid. I’d like to See Jarvis and Winer post opinions around this.

I think your points about interativity are spot on — and RSS…Jeez, with Winer as an investor, I’d be afraid to deploy without it

-CST

u never going to see that investment again…

http://www.dobizo.com …great investment…lol

The only thing I don’t like about the site from a quick look is that most of the titles go onto two lines… it is very annoying to the eye (well, mine anyway…)

Given the recent talk about comments and their place in blogs - this is completely off topic - i’m amazed to read the comments on this very open - and as Chris says, candid - post and see only a handful of legitimate comments. With wankers promoting their own sites, and some tool who’s obviously SO upset about TC he reads it almost in real time - yeah, I’m talking about you, No. 8 - it makes you wonder whether there’s something in this debate about moderating comments in the interests of reader experience.

Geoff - these ARE moderated. You should see the really good stuff that we delete.

For the love people: the letters “btw” do not mean “between”. It is “by the way”.

When did this madness start?

Mike, I love the open, critical review you give of your own investment.

That’s very refreshing to see from TechCrunch.

Just curious - what happened to the other writers here, Natalie and Nick, or did I miss something? Either way, its good to see more frequent Mike posts.

First I’d like to add additional compliments to Mike for being so candid/honest in this post about a company he invested in.

As for Daylife, I visited earlier today and it held my attention for roughly 1 minute, then I moved on (and I’m a notorious early adopter). Finding Mike’s post made me go back to Daylife again, and as much as I appreciate new approaches to media distribution, I have to say that the site feels like a team of people met and tried to come up with what “on paper” seemed like the next step in news aggregation innovation. But the site is not only not sticky, it’s a bit off-putting (read: turn off).

Buzz words/concepts/technologies are fine, but execution and user-experience are more important. All the pretty Associated Press pics are nice, but I can get that at: http://news.yahoo.com/photos. I’m particularly pained about saying negative things about this because I enjoy Jeff Jarvis’ voice on his own blog and I think he has a number of good things to say about the new face of media. But “writing about” what works and “creating” what works are two different things. Bottom line: the site is too much work in a world of *numerous news options.
(*decided to join the link plug trend) Also, what’s up with the name? Nice for search engines, but not very sexy/meaningful.

Mike, do you get the sense that they wanted both your $$ as well as your advice? IMHO, you give companies like Daylife a lot of valuable perspective, because of your knowledge of the market. To me, that’s worth more than the money. It stuns me that they didn’t check in with you on a regular basis during the dev process.

Hooray for human editors. I like it. Clean. Feels like a TechMeme for the rest of the news, which is what I’ve been looking for. It’s Digg without the dolts.

IMHO: If you want to comment/participate, launch your own damn site. You can always participate, it’s the Internet stupid. And RSS is a waste of time, no worries Mike.

Mike,

I can tell there’s some good technology behind this site. Problem is in the presentation which seems crowded.

I’m not sure how you would ever squeeze ads onto a page that is already filled with pictures. About the lack of RSS or Atom feeds, it’s more important from a syndication perspective to widen their audience than personal convenience.

A talented database administrator is key and it looks like Daylife has one by the interrelationship between all the categories, stories and photos.

Shrink the thumbnail pics, add more whitespace, remove the mandatory Flash 8 from the homepage, include feeds to bring outside traffic and go from there.

Peter W.

I agree with Peter W.

The Flash homepage was a waste of time.

Ashish is dead on. Most people don’t care about RSS. I prefer newspapers because they’re intelligently (well sometimes!) compiled by humans, and Daylife works similarly. I don’t want an RSS dump - I want human compilation.

tim, that comment makes no sense, the rss is generated by feeds that originate at the same wire services the newspapers use. okay, so they order them 1..10 instead of left column, right column, its the same data.

daylife should shut its doors yesterday. news aggregation was solved years ago. yahoo news gives you 99% of what you actually care to read, serves it faster, and google news fills in the blanks

Kris

Re the question about Mike’s “other investment” - edgeio. Along with Mike I am a founder, Mike is on my board and I am the CEO. We are 9 months into the company. We now have about 700k new listings per day. Our listers are a wide range - from individuals on blogs all the way through to Amazon and EBay. We have comprehensive coverage (16000 cities worldwide - compared to 300 on competitor sites). Traffic doubled (month over month) each month since August 2006.

Alexa seems to be broadly accurate on scale but not on actual numbers. We use AWStats and Google Analytics.

We did raise $5m in Series A financing (actually is is now $5.8m). We have made some stellar hires that are yet to be announced. And we are positioning edgeio as a search engine for “stuff”. Compare results on edgeio for a Volkswagen Jetta with a similar search on Google. With edgeio you get Jettas (globally or locally depending on your geography choices), with Google you get web sites about Jettas but not actual Jettas.

Our goal is to “bring together, organize and distribute the world’s marketplaces”.

Hope that helps.

Best
Keith Teare
ceo/founder/edgeio

These news sites all blow compared to digg. Daylife has a little bit of a cool factor w/ the UI which is totally blown thanks to the slow (image) load time when switching from one story to the next. Why the F wouldn’t they be loading all the images in the background so I don’t have to wait 10-15 seconds for each image to load after I click it??? The clear, high-res images = good, slow load times = unnacceptible. news . google . com or digg for me.

I think the whole idea of creating yet another news site without any innovation shows the lack of imagination out there. Basically these concepts are being replicated and not evolved on. The nature of internet is such that such clones shall rest in hell.

I am working on a website, taking a completely different approach of getting the relevent mail come to you. And yes it’s socially powered. And no its not digg clone. Time for a change folks.

And it’s not vaporware

Let’s see if you all like it !!!! . just wait

I take it that you privately tried to get the company to improve it’s offering before going public with a trashing. Perhaps this is a (product) management issue that can be fixed over time…but I still don’t see why you’d take this approach.

One more thing….RSS is still unknown to the great unwashed. If it’s not a default function of IE 6 then most people have never heard of it.

Mike,

As an investor, you surely said to them, “Look, I’m going to diss this thing on TechCrunch if you don’t make it a LOT better.”

And then when they didn’t you had to decide, “Do I follow through on what I said?”

You did, in what I’m sure it was a hard call, but your honesty is the reason TechCrunch has done so well. Good job.

-Scott

You overestimate the proportion of web users who use RSS. Also, the fact that you waited until the launch date to trash the company reflects poorly upon you as an investor.

As they say in the old country…..no business like news business….

Alternatives are good, but they have to work….

http://www.newspoo.com is one of those sites also…

Sink or swim…..competition is good….

I had planned something similar to Daylife but I could not get the programmers in time in New Delhi. I guess I will have to make do with writing for MediaVidea blog.

Recently, I got the short end of blogging in my rather short blogging life.
More here:
http://mediavidea.blogspot.com.....ggers.html

What I find most interesting, is two of the valley’s biggest movers and shakers seemingly disagreeing despite both of them being investors in it.

Dave W’s got a sunny-day take on this, while Mike here’s not too satisfied with where his investment’s been taken ( you can pick up that shirt at the cleaner’s now, Mike. Heavy starch, right ? ).

As someone else on scriptings comments page mentioned, and I would have to concur, looks like a lot of fancy packaging. Bookmarks, great. I have an aggregator that can cache stories for extended periods of time ( way to go, SharpReader ) if I want to now, so no joy there.

So yet again, tell me why it is we aren’t in a 2.0 bubble again ? Someone ?Anyone ?

Oh…before I forget. “Tim” ( is that you, O’Reilly ? ), most people don’t think about it as “RSS”. They think newsfeed, only geeks like myself actually USE the terms themselves. And it’s specifically because human-chosen news is so slanted ( in BOTH directions ) today that people have sought out broader forms of acquiring information ( both up to date and archival ).

The concept that ANYONE who would access DayLife would NOT immediately think of RSS ( or newsfeed ) is ridiculous. That sort of person wouldn’t even be seeking out news via the web. Even my mother hates to look through the local paper’s website for news information. She got tired of it, so I set her up with some newsfeeds from NYT, Washington Post, and others. Browsing through DayLife WITHOUT the ordering capabilities which could be built into an RSS feed would be painful at best, and plain nuts at worst.

It’s about as underwhelming as most of the other companies covered on techcrunch. At least Mike isn’t biased toward his own investments, we appreciate the honesty.

Keith,

Thanks for the update. Sounds like you shifted your focus from classifieds to product search (”Froogle”). Good luck.

—k

Michael, that’s very honest of you and *very* cool. It takes a big person to say what you said when you made an investment.

Mark

Well this is good , here is my two cents
Focus on the picture slider on the homepage , I guess that has a lot of value for people who dont like to read the news , but just like to skim through. There should be an autoplay button below so the stories scroll through like a presentation. Once you click on any the news appears with saving and arcival capabapities for the future. The picture slider with the news photos is very sttractive , news companies wil definately have an eye on it.

It might not work that well as a portal, but try to think, what the technology uses could mean for professional users in media and corporate comms as a news management tool. Research on people, quotes, cross-linking, it´s all there, so if the folks get that automated to a larger extend, there will definetely be a market, and if in addition there will be a consumer version as a news aggregator thats just fine.

Michael,
Sorry to hear such words, but the words you are writing here are signaling to me that you can’t be accomplished businessman and you’re sounding so unprofessional. You shouldn’t care what some digital maoist and cohorts are saying . Daylife is good, I have to say. No need to have RSS at all immediatly during first week.