Daylife.com, a new way to explore the News
Daylife.com New York based news site, backed by Craig Newmark of Craigslist, is now up and running. It combines Web 2.0 elements with conventional news aggregation into a visually unique format. The cover page with rotating big pictures is very cool. It reflects some of the biggest stories happening.
Daylife.com has thousands of automatically created pages, news articles and blog posts. It does a very good job of associating text and rich media content to other content. They feature a snapshot of the world’s top stories, by category, updated every few minutes from the international news publications. Also you can save stuff you find interesting in a section called My World.
“We gather stories of all shapes and sizes from countless perspectives around the world, and then present them in a rich browseable landscape, helping you make connections you never knew existed”, they say. News collection is automated, although the stories that appear on the home page are chosen by human editors.
Daylife is competing with is entering the market other aggregation sites came out a year ago with their products. Gather.com, Inform.com, NewsVine Topix and Digg, all have competing products. Google News reigns over all of them.
Mozilla is making millions sending traffic to Google
The open-source Mozilla Foundation made $53 million in 2005 just sending traffic from the Firefox browser search box to Google’s search. Searchers don’t even have to click on a single ad for Mozilla. Every time a Firefox user types a query into the one-inch search box embedded in its browser Mozilla gets paid. It’s a traffic-for-cash deal they signed with Google.
Mozilla released Firefox in November 2004, and since then haven been 279 million browser downloads, 14 percent of the market share (79 percent is Explorer, and 4.3 percent Safari). Now try to imagine the 2006 numbers…
Turner Broadcasting set up a team for new web ideas
Turner Broadcasting has set up a small unit to develop new web ideas and build up niche sites. This team has launched CNN Pipeline, VeryFunnyAds and ACC Select. “We’re building businesses outside our core that allow us to compete for other pools of money”, explains a top executive.
It’s a low cost niche approach. They understand that the web is not merely an extension of TV, and they want to avoid old media thinking and slow product launches.
Allow users broadcast live video and be the next MySpace
A new video site called like Stickam.com is building up a business allowing users broadcast live video and conduct face-to-face video chats with other users, often from their bedrooms and all without monitoring by any. In addition Stickam’s users can design their own pages and upload video clips.
“Web cams are a magnet for sexual predators. The only thing you get from the combination of Web cams and young people are problems,” said to The New York Times Parry Aftab, executive director of the child protection organization WiredSafety.org.
Other social networks have decided against allowing conversations over live video because of the potential for abuse and opposition from child-safety advocates.
But new video-sharing sites in particular are filling niches abandoned by YouTube / Google. Letting people do whatever they want is one way for these sites to differentiate themselves.
260,000 registered users
Some people think Stickam could be the next MySpace, and that people would migrate to even controversial video sites if they have features that MySpace and YouTube did not.
Stickam, based in Los Angeles and founded by a video conferencing company, says it has 260,000 registered users, and is adding 2,000 to 3,000 each day. Its first product was a program that let users bring a live Web cam feed directly onto their MySpace pages and other social networks and bulletin boards, but in October, MySpace blocked the Stickam service.
One major media company has embraced Stickam. Warner Brothers Records opened a page on the service for two of its artists, Jamie Kennedy and Stu Stone, and trained a Web cam on them as they recorded a music video. More than 9,500 users watched the event and chatted with the performers during breaks in filming.
