SocialPicks for Financial Networking
By Vivek Puri | August 28th, 2006 at 05:53 pm ET
Financial Social Networking sites are popping up quickly. Latest entrant is SocialPicks.com.
Features: SocialPicks allows users to search for stocks by ticker symbol and among others things, gives the stock Buy/Sell Rating, user analysis, related discussion between SocialPicks members. Users can add stocks to their watch lists, or write analysis about them. Users can also get others sentiments about a stock, whether it�s bullish or bearish. As expected you can assign tags to stocks, and pull up all stocks related to a tag.
Another main feature is the People area where you can view any user’s profile, their investment ideas, Personal portfolio, and Investment Accuracy. You can follow a user or you can add them as your friend. Members can also join groups or start a new group, to diversify their market knowledge, which will provide a competitive platform between members, or as groups as they compete with other groups on SocialPicks. For every group there are Stock Panels, Investment Ideas, and Whiteboard.
The site is geared towards user collaboration, which in turn will provide better information about stocks and investment ideas. Each user is assigned a score based on number of investment ideas, accuracy of shared ideas, return of personal portfolio, number of analysis written. So if a Financial Geek wants to prove himself, SocialPicks is the right place.
Technology/UI: Site is logical and straight forward and works perfectly in Firefox as well as Internet Explorer. RSS feeds are there for anything and everything, which is a nice idea. You can get feeds for Recent Picks, Popular Picks, Recent Analysis, Popular Analysis, Recent Activities (including pick, sell and watch) for People. Given that it’s a new site, it was expected that stock quotes and charts will support Ajax based refresh, but that doesn�t seem to be the case. Hope it�s on their feature list.
Revenue: As of now site is free of advertising, which makes me wonder how they will go about funding their operations. Maybe they can start charging user for creating groups just like meetup.com.
Competition: Social picks will face major competition from Finance giants� yahoo, Google, but has advantage ’cause of its community based features. Also, more competition comes from similar startups including Feelingbullish.com, Bullpoo.com, Gradr.com, and Stocktickr.com. It needs to be seen how they will differentiate themselves and carve out a better strategy against their big and small competitors.
Future: As per Weiting Liu, SocialPicks is working on development of better set of collaboration tools and fully integrating Groups feature into the SocialPicks site.
Right now SocialPicks is in the beta testing phase and are looking for users to profile their site. I have 20 invites for people who want to try out SocialPicks. Email me for invites (vp at vivekpuri dot com).
Links:
SocialPicks
