I started using Daylife just after it first launched. Since then I dropped if from my “Daily Stuff” tabs in FireFox that I usually open simulatenously when I go online. I liked a lot of things about the service, but it just wasn’t something that I needed at the time.
Just having revisited the site, I noticed some major changes to the user experience. The huge, page-filling image that previously occupied the start page has been removed in favor of more genre-conforming elements for online news sites. And for the most part, the site is far less image-rich than before. In areas like “Celebrity” this is unfortunate, but overall it’s probably a good move. With more focus on text and links, Daylife should be able to better expose and leverage their algorithms and entity extraction. And I like the basic information design on the site, so it works well.
A next step for them might be to expose more user-generated content and metadata. Comments, blogging, tagging, etc., would set it apart from other similar news services. (Now, there’s a good quesiton: how can tagging be leveraged on a current awareness service, where articles come on and go off the radar in a matter of days? With no time to incubate a collection of tags, what do you do there?). But their API is already a huge step in the Web 2.0 direction, so I’m going to knock them.
Anyway, I’m going to give it another shot and add it back to my daily tabs.
EXPERIENCING INFORMATION 