So, Daylife, the startup that Mike Arrington invested in so many moons ago, has finally unveiled itself (even to Mike), and lo and behold, even in spite of its A-list backers and their supporters, it is profoundly underwelming, with perhaps one exception. Daylife is a news aggregator, much in the vein like Topix, Google News and Techmeme.

Although it has a slick interface and and admittedly cool design, there are many things that are confusing, puzzling — particularly about its design and UI elements.

Here are five thoughts that came to mind:

1. The idea of “covers” are so 2001: cool in thought, even cool in presentation. But “covers” are just splash pages — and I’m sorry to say this, but splash pages went out of style about five years ago. Particularly, in the context of a news site. When I want news, I want it in the simplest uncluttered fashion possible, and the first thing you’re showing me is a giant photo of John Negroponte?

2. Confusing navigation: To actually “get” to news, past the “covers” you have to go to the “top stories”, which isn’t the default setting. Where is the link to “top stories” — its way up at the top left hand corner … its not entirely intuitive, to be honest. I spent a whole 11 seconds wondering how the hell I could just get to the news. And as funny as the last statement sounded, its about 10 seconds longer than the average surfer is willing to look for the main link to actually get to your news.

3. More confusing Navigation with a strange emphasis on “quotations”: Main news stories are enumerated 1-10 under different categories, such as “World”, “Technology” and “Celebrity”. Once you click on a given news item, it takes you to a page which splits up “news” from the various news sites. These pages are particularly puzzling: first of all, they present you with a summary, which makes sense. But its shoved way up at the top. What the focus of the page, however, is quotes from different articles, and I’m not sure if THAT makes sense. After all, the focus of the page shouldn’t be a quote picked possibly out of context, but the summary itself. And clearly their algorithms require work — because in one article about the Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin, all three quotes were exactly the same.

Yikes.

4. Making the False Dichotomy out of “Redundant” and “Unique” News: Daylife tries to make the distinction between “redundant” and “non-redundant” articles as well; and you have the opportunity to turn “redudant” articles “on” or “off” with a link. This is funny and odd, because the vast majority of articles written by mainstream news organizations are virtually identical in content. That’s why “news” is a commodity. By this virtue, nearly ALL news articles are “redundant”. Sure enough, when you examine the articles that show up for most “news” that are presumably NOT redundant, they are actually redundant.

Reading the ones listed for the news about the Crocodile Hunter’s video shows that they are uniformly the same — with the leading news from the African News Directory, leading to a “full story” at e!news. My, my, that’s hard hitting news.

5. Topics are Good. Give Us More Topics. One of its feature elements are the way it organizes information around key newsworthy elements, whether they be people, organzations, or places. These are represented off the main column of news by square pictures with superimposed titles, like “Duke University”. These topics are rather cool once you click on them, because it organizes news into reverse chronological order (past 24h, past week), and has a way of graphically showing how much news has been written in a period of time for a particular topic. It shows related “topics” as well on the left hand side.

The issue of “topics” is the single most important feature of Daylife as it provides a means of providing perspective to any given news topic. This is very good. No other news aggregator does this. Hey, I love Techmeme as the next dude, but trying to find out anything BUT the most recent bit of news is all but impossible. There’s no “search” feature, for gabe’s sake! :)

The issue with these topics are that they are not yet available for every topic; that is, they seem to be built from the ground up and on arbitrary grounds. The search results for any given search term produces something like a “topic” (search “Digg”, for example), however, they don’t have many of the features that a designated “topic” does. Since Daylife’s “topics” are clearly its strength, they should make a move to make more of them, and build the topic results into every single news result or search result.

Bottom Line …
At the end of the day, one can’t help but feel that Daylife is a great attempt at a news aggregator that is about a year too late. All design quirks aside, there’s nothing paradigm-changing about Daylife that would want me to use it BEYOND other news aggregators. It doesn’t collect mainstream news better, than say, Google News. And it doesn’t feature rarer, good stuff that vertically oriented news aggregators that Techmeme or Buzztracker might find. In fact, Digg, Reddit, and Netscape probably do a better job at finding better content than Daylife currently does as well.

I get the feeling that Daylife desperately wants to be the new “simple but cool” version of a news aggregator — and it could be, as long as they’re flexible enough to fix things. Problem is, will “simple but cool” be good enough to break into a market that already has its players, fans, and is rapidly maturing? Time will tell. And for Mike Arrington’s invesment dollars, I hope it does.