As submitted by NewRulesofInvesting

This is a side to side comparison of two of the best online financial sites: Yahoo Finance and Google Finance.  Yahoo is still the largest and most popular finance site by far but Google is serious about finance.  Let’s see how the two financial portals stack up against each other.

Speed

Google Finance: Typical fast-loading Google pages.  Google’s site is broad and doesn’t go deep.  Pages for individual stocks are only 1 page deep (Google links out for things like option chains, major holder, etc.)

Yahoo Finance: Yahoo Finance is fast.  As opposed to Google, Yahoo content resides primarily on Yahoo pages and Yahoo is responsible for page load speed throughout the site.  This can fluctuate as any large website can throughout the day.

Charting

Google Finance: Google primarily uses a simple javascript-loaded chart without any bling.  It loads fast and allows easy to manipulate x-axis (time period).  When you’re figuring out what a particular stocks has done over the past 17 days, the chart also calculates the return for a given time frame beyond the standard 1-day, 5-day, 3 month, etc. time period.  Google also plots news events onto their charts which is kind of cool (not necessarily tradeable).

Yahoo Finance: Yahoo Finance charts are much more robust.  Advanced charts have incorporated a similar charting function like Google’s and provides an overlay of numerous technical indicators (MACD, RSI).  Because these charts are so powerful, they also tend to be bulky and seize up.

Real Time Quotes

Google Finance: Google provides real time quotes both during market hours and pre- and post- market.  Google’s quotes on market indices tend to skew erratically during the transition to an open market as well as trails when the market makes large moves to the upside or downside.

Yahoo Finance: Yahoo also provides real time quotes both during market hours and off.  Yahoo’s premarket quotes are not as reliable as Google’s.  Yahoo occasionally doesn’t have a price premarket for a wide array of stocks.  Yahoo has a scrolling ticker as well for stocks that is personalized to the behavior of the user.

Breadth

Google Finance: Google gives basic info all on one page.  Anything more a user needs to link off.  News, financial info, blogs all included.  Very shallow, quick and dirty use.  Google does a good job bringing in blog content but lacks good, standardized PR content, still necessary in the research process.

Yahoo Finance: Yahoo provides an entire research environment.  All the content and data is supplied by Yahoo.  From major holders to options chains to blogs and PR, Yahoo is a virtual poor man’s Bloomberg.

Innovation

Google Finance: Google allows users to download data, making the site more portable than we’ve traditionally seen.  Google portrays the data environment well around a stock.  Beyond that, nothing particularly innovative about what Google’s done so far.
Yahoo Finance: Yahoo Finance is the 800lb gorilla and essentially helped to democratize financial information.  Yahoo has done a good job bringing in financial blogs in a controlled environment, using SeekingAlpha to help filter.  Charts are very powerful.  Not too much current innovation going on either on the surface.

When you’re talkin’ ’bout your generation, do you like to compare old-school vs. new-school technology savvy and habits? I know I enjoy having some fun with “olds” who think the Onion article about “The Google for Older Americans” is about a real site (my dad) or who equate computers with “the Devil” (my grandma).

Techcrunch had good coverage of Wikinvest’s launch of embeddable, annotate-able, wiki-able charts.  Wikinvest, which like it sounds, is a wiki focused on building out user-generated company and stock information.  Now, the site has developed charts that can be annotated and embedded into websites and blogs.

If you check out Apple’s chart (sorry wordpress.com doesn’t allow posting of javascript) and click on ‘B’, you’ll see that on June 10th, Apple reported a new iPhone with GPS and 3G capabilities, better battery life and improved audio quality.

Or, on Amgen’s chart, you can click on ‘L’ and see someone’s explanation for a continued slide in the stock price (which he/she attributed to a potential safety risk for Aranesp)

Google Finance has charts that attempt to pair up news events with movements in the stock price.  While it’s a really interesting cause-effect, Google Finance unfortunately doesn’t capture the news or information that is affecting stock price movement.  I attribute this to 2 reasons: 1) Sometimes it’s just impossible to explain price movement (sorry, financial commentators) 2) Google’s news set is in some cases unexplicable weird and picks up stories that seemingly have little impact.

Anyway, these charts powered by wikinvest are interesting for financial bloggers and may ultimately do a good job of providing numerous opinions as to what’s affecting individualk stocks at any given moment.  It would be very interesting for someone to look into the accuracy of wikinvest’s annotated charts and provide some metrics at some point (if this is possible to track).  If anything, these charts improve on Google’s charts (which I happen to like) by overlaying wiki-like UGC on top of stock charts.

Thinking about Facebook’s Beacon from a partner perspective…

The Techdirt Insight Community recently addressed this issue and posited it to their group of experts.

“Does it make sense for a consumer-facing company to sign on to Beacon — or has the program forever been tarnished? How should we approach using Beacon? In an ideal world, we would like for it to be a way for fans of our products to pass on effective “endorsements” of the product, but we do not want to be seen as doing something intrusive or upsetting. If not Beacon, is there a better way to do this either within Facebook or through a different platform?”

Here’s my answer:

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I think the only two games in town that are worth exploring are Facebook and Google. MySpace is too raw for most consumer goods companies and the demographic doesn’t compare to Facebook’s and Google’s.

So, let’s look how Facebook’s efforts stack up vs. Google’s:

Facebook

Traffic: Facebook is on fire. Traffic and usage stats are sky high
Monetization: monetization is just getting better. Most of the current ad sales are sponsorship-related. With Beacon, lead generation becomes viral. Huge potential here.
Reach: Facebook just announced that they are licensing their infrastructure. This moves Facebook even closer to the Google/Open Social platform in terms of reach.
Privacy is certainly an issue. Check out the traffic to Facebook’s privacy page. Opening up profiles caused a bigger blip in users’ minds than did the hullabaloo surrounding Beacon.

The Pro-Beacon camp basically espouses the idea that (see Dave McClure’s article on the matter)
1) Facebook has introduced a universal opt-out which should satisfy the privacy police.
2) The biggest mistake was a PR one — one that positioned Beacon as opt-in when it wasn’t. Facebook is addressing this issue.
3) people who are going bananas over Beacon should understand that most people on Facebook are used to the default being opt-out (ie, lifestyle transparency), not opt-in (selective sharing).

I see parallels with what’s occurring surrounding Beacon to the snafus made during the introduction of In-Text Advertising. There was tremendous, immediate push-back when in-text advertising was introduced. Although privacy wasn’t the primary concern, users and customer advocates didn’t like the intrusion of advertising. Today, the ads (run by such networks as Vibrant Media and Kontera). Companies like Forbes were forced to remove the advertising originally and now, (almost) no one bats an eye. Editorial and advertising converge — I think the same evolution is going to occur with Beacon. My extra-Facebook activity is going to join my Facebook activity to be published to my friends network via my News Feed. That’s what I wanted when I joined Facebook, wasn’t it?

Google

Traffic: No one puts up search numbers like Google. Even at this stage, Google continues to gain market share
Monetization: Google runs it’s own network of publishers and has the ability to juice its numbers by adjusting its variable payouts to its partners and by adjusting how much traffic it shares out to the network vs. internalizing/monetizing it itself.
Reach: Keeps growing.
Privacy: Google offers Web History internally to users. Now that Open Social and Google Profiles have launched (see my article about this soft launch and what it means for Google’s moves into social networking), Google is going to have to deal with privacy issues as well. Google has tons of personalized information about users (from Gmail, Search History, Blogger, Docs) and continues to accumulate this info. Google has to be careful how it shares out this info and should learn from Facebook’s mistakes.

Google’s advantage vis-a-vis Facebook is that even with Beacon, Facebook is pretty much a closed network. You won’t have 100% participation and users still spend a lot of time and activity outside the Facebook network. Google has replaced the portal of the 1990s to become essentially the Internet for many users. From search, to email, from Adwords to Analytics to Checkout, Google has closed the loop in terms of activity.

I think Google is also more advanced in terms of providing partners with analytics — the absolute KEY to web advertising. It’s not enough to provide partners with an interface for social networking. Partners should demand ROI. Facebook is just in the early days of providing metrics for its Apps. Google has made an entire business out of metrics. As markets look to expand their influence in social networks, they will need the tools to address this.