In case you haven’t been on Twitter in the past 20 minutes, the U.S. stock market is collapsing. Well, it was collapsing (the Dow was down over 1,000 points at one point), but now it’s bouncing back. But you’d be forgiven if you have no idea what’s going on just from watching the web, because frankly, it’s struggling to keep up.
It appears that under the weight of just about everyone checking the web to see what’s happening with the market, sites are failing left and right. Google Finance keeps bringing up an error message to “please try again in 30 seconds.” Yahoo Finance, meanwhile is completely down. Trying to look for the news via Twitter, meanwhile, yields mixed results. At one point when the Dow was down about 1,000, plenty of people were still tweeting that it was down 400. Others were saying it was down 600, etc. The problem is that the “realtime” web wasn’t even fast enough for how fast things were crashing. → Read More
Finance sites like Yahoo Finance and Google Finance haven’t changed much in the past ten years. The fonts are different. Maybe there’s some more real-time quotes and fancier, interactive charts. But at their core they all follow pretty much the same formula: dump as much data on the individual investor as they can and let them figure it out. Wikinvest, which started out as a crowd-sourced investing site, is trying to change all of that with a complete redesign that is being turned on tonight for members who log in.
Over the past two years, Wikinvest has become a great resource for researching stocks but some of its most interesting data was hidden away. It is not a daily habit like other finance sites, attracting only about 500,000 unique visitors a month. The redesign aims to change that by putting all of Wikinvest’s industry- and company-specific data front and center. Each stock page has a chart, key metrics, a news feed, wiki analysis, and opinions from bulls and bears. → Read More
Yahoo Finance is launching a volley of tweaks to its Finance site tomorrow. The changes include the addition of interactive stock charts, improved message boards and business-related video clips from ABC.com, CNN.com, Forbes.com and SmartMoney. Yahoo will also be releasing a finance widget for websites, which we wrote about in mid-May. The changes are clearly in response to Google Finance, which was released in March 2006. Google Finance has not grabbed significant market share since its launch – Yahoo by comparison is the largest finance related website by page views. It boasts 10 million unique visitors and 467 million page views per month. About 1.5 million people a day visit Yahoo Finance. (source: comscore, June 2006) → Read More
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