Daylife is one of those hyped startups that may end up suffering from the fact that some of their investors are famous tech bloggers. Dave Winer and Michael Arrington have been hinting for months about this New York based startup. How could there not be high expectations?

Daylife is now in public beta and what they are is a news aggregator. They pull stories from what appears to be hand picked mainstream media sources and a few blogs.They claim to offer, “better news.” So far all I can see is a new spin on the web based news aggregator. Not better, just different.

The site has a clean, fresh look after you get past the home page. It’s unfortunate that the home page utilizes flash technology and a bunch of photos to represent the top stories of the day. You have to mouse over the images in order to see the title of the story. Really un-necessary in my opinion.

Once you get past the cover page there’s plenty of news. But it’s nothing new. Looks like the same headlines from Yahoo! and Google.

This new player makes a couple of egregious mistakes at launch that they could always fix down the line. But the gaps are so basic you would think they chose to omit the kinds of features that make news sites worthwhile. There is no blog, no RSS feeds and no mobile version. There is a feature called My World that allows you to create an account to save news items.

I accessed Daylife on my new, supercharged mobile phone and the site did not render well. Other news sites like Google and USA Today are clean and very readable.

How could a company with Dave Winer as an investor not have a single feed in their arsenal at launch? How could they not have a blog to let people know what’s happening with the company? I don’t know myself.

Daylife does do some interesting things with their site by integrating thumbnails for related stories and photo galleries. Check out this search on New York Mets pitcher Pedro Martinez. Looks nice. Now give me an RSS feed of the results please. It would also be nice if their My World feature created a personalized feed.

For the moment this is a good site if you want to dig deep into the news and explore the connections between people and stories. I’m the type of person who likes to drill through news quickly so I’m not as interested in what they’re offering. I’ll check back in a bit to see how they’ve expanded the feature set.

[tags]Social Media, News, Daylife[/tags]