As I wrote yesturday, I had an interview at Wikinvest.com my post was “to be continued”. Where was I, oh yah, I was in the middle of making a case for why the current wikinvest.com will likely be unsuccessful. Basically, unless they have quite a few tricks up their sleeves, I don’t see it catching on (and being useful as it intended to be).
The reasons I have encompass two supporting statements; 1. I think I know the type of people that are likely to contribute, and they are few and far between, plus a rare breed. 2. I am the type of person likely to contribute.
Looking at part 1: People need to understand a wiki, I guess that population IS growing. Wikipedia is proof. But think about the intersection of that group of people that invest in stocks, then think about the number of investors that are willing to write for free, and have the time to do so (ie no money, fame, or for lack of a better word, want to win a game). It is the people that belong to this subset of the population that are going to contribute. Then you have the fact that people also have to be willing to write about historic things, boring things, known things, and it of course would help if people held and followed a stock for longer than a year or two.
There is a small problem with their current “ranks”, they are sortof flawed in terms of intrinsic motivation. People can climb the ranks, and essentially “win” the game. That is, people can accumulate points but once they have achieved “Sr. Director” status they have nowhere to go but down. This is a minor detail, but in terms of user experience think of how depressing it will be for me to have been promoted to Sr. Associate, only to log in in 2 months and be demoted. I won’t loose sleep over it. Sure they can keep getting more points and appear to promote contributors, but they have placed a CAP by ranking the percentile of people and the levels they can achieve, then fall back to. I think the majority of people will log in, contribute a few things on their favorite stocks and then get bored. You can solve this demotion problem with one of these.
Also there is inevitably the problem of unreliable information…but that exists everywhere, so I can’t hold that against them too much.
Here’s a few ways they can improve:
1. Forward projections of earnings and cashflows - assign points to contributors for being close when the numbers come out. People will keep coming back to add their predictions of the numbers, and see how close the site was to the results, it could truely become better than “analysts were expecting X cents per share”.
2. Upgrades and Downgrades. Think Twitter + NewRatings.com. Contributors could answer “I’m upgrading this stock because:” or “I’m downgrading this stock because:” It would create a really quick view of the market thinking…plus people would start to feel bloggers guilt and a need to constantly contribute to the dynamic flow of information.
3. There are a bunch of problems usability wise. You can fix them by putting a good team together.
4. Have an IPO section, information on IPO’s are hard to collect, and people could actually use a resource like this.
5. Show a list of stocks people are “searching for” and “contributing to”, and weight the list by complete/incomplete information. Call them “Ideas”. A dynamic feed of the stocks that people want information on, plus want to write information on, and where they don’t have information. The last contraint is the most important to sift out AAPL. For instance, I think an algorithm like this, could point to ideas like DRYS, CROX, or MON…BEFORE they become over-valued.
6. A blog badge (duh?) - “I’ve been promoted to SENIOR ASSOCIATE…and all I get is the intrinsic satisfaction, I want to put it on my BLOG man!”
The bottom line is in it’s current state, it’s dead in the water, but likely just as I have ideas, so do they. I think with the right marketting and innovation, Wikinvest.com could be really great. I’ll be watching.
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