Google Finance as information heaven

Imagine you want to know how the stock price of a company (say Apple, Inc) is doing. While at it you might want to know either who’s the CEO or what was last year’s revenue. Moreover, since news have are very important when we talk about a stock why not check the company’s related news including a match between the time when the news was broadcasted and the value of the stock before and after.

And what if you decide you want to know what are blogs saying about the company? Or in discussion groups?

What if you could have all this aggregated a well designed information visualization page? You’ve got it. It’s called Google Finance.

Google Finance is not different from Yahoo! Finance in general. But as usual the devil is in the details. Just two examples of how google as delivered a better user experience and thus a better product. Google let’s you search a company by company name not just stock symbol (e.g. “Google”, “Cars” or “AAPL”). How natural is that? Google is also cleaner than Yahoo in a sense that you have more white space. Space that’s empty to let you browse information in a better way.

I noticed that Google is not displaying ads for now (and this helps the looks of it). But this is probably temporary. Like they did with search, you get lot’s of attention (users) first and then slowly introduce ads. It’s been their strategy all along.

Why am I so enthusiastic about a Finance application? Because it’s an amazing information visualization tool and because I’ll have to get back to it in another post regarding a few ideas I’ve been working on.

March 27, 2006 |