Yahoo Inc. has recently unveiled an upgraded version of its top-ranked financial information site that features new stock charting tools, improved investor chat rooms and financial video news.
Yahoo is currently expanding the capabilities of its finance site, in a bid to expand the audience for its investor; the upgrade includes improved and more interactive tools, stock charts, among other features, to help the Internet giant maintain its status as king of the financial information websites, the Associated Press reports via the New York Post.
Yahoo Finance also plans to allow other Web sites to embed stock charts, quotes, and financial news headlines from Yahoo, free of charge, on other sites using a small amount of code.
"Yahoo Finance is introducing this feature, but before long you will see this coming from other parts of Yahoo," said Yahoo Finance General Manager Peggy White of plans to allow other Web sites to serve up Yahoo entertainment, sports or news items.
The Internet search engine said that it expected to finish the re-design of its www.yahoo.com home page this month. Yahoo’s new Yahoo Finance webpage is slated for launch on Monday, and it has been in development stages for the past year and a half, according to the AP.
The announcements came as Internet titans such as Yahoo, Microsoft and Google battle for online devotees whose visits translate into advertising revenue for the US firms.
Finance.yahoo.com attracts 33 percent of the U.S. online finance market, or a nearly three times bigger audience than its closest rival, MSN MoneyCentral, with a 13 percent share, according to data from Web measurement firm Hitwise.
In part, the upgrade of Yahoo Finance is a response to the introduction four months ago by rival Google Inc. of a competing financial information site, analysts say. But Google Finance remains a bare-bones financial information site focused on basic stock quotes, graphs, corporate news and data, as well as links to blog commentary.
Initially, the improvements at Yahoo Finance are focused on the main U.S.-centered site at http://finance.yahoo.com. International versions of Yahoo Finance will be upgraded over the next six to 12 months, White said.
Yahoo was particularly keen to capitalize on the popularity of social networking websites such as MySpace and YouTube.
To celebrate the website’s makeover, Yahoo invited students from the London Film Academy, Parsons School of Design in New York, the San Francisco Art Institute and Yale University to create humorous videos based on the theme.
This exciting campaign highlights many different voices and creative expressions developed by young talent in film and design as well as Yahoo users themselves, said Cammie Dunaway, chief marketing officer at Yahoo.
Yahoo made the short films available for viewing at the website http://www.video.yahoo.com and invited visitors to submit their own original videos.
The new site does away with the two-dimensional stock charts that required excessive scrolling to locate information, and in their place are new, improved charts that allow users to see significant happenings, like splits and dividends, while staying on the main chart page, the AP reports. Users can also easily generate charts of specified dates to compare more than one equity over a given time period within the same chart, according to the AP.
Investor Chat Room Revival:
Yahoo also announced enhancements to its investors’ tools and services website, offering free real-time stock quotes, a service once only available on the web for a steep fee.
The upgrade of Yahoo Finance is a work in progress.
White said Yahoo is working to upgrade over the next 60 days its stock quote pages, which serve as the starting-point for many investors in individual stocks.
White said, “It’s all about putting more power in the hands of the users.”
Business news videos from ABC, CNN, Forbes and SmartMoney online sources and full-screen interactive charts were among the Yahoo Finance additions announced by the Sunnyvale, California, company.
By offering a new reputation system that allows readers to rate the value of postings on its stock message boards, Yahoo has recently begun seeking to breathe life into the decade-old stock chat room phenomenon. Yahoo also made it easy for its investment tools to be linked to blogs or websites and for people to swap insights on its message boards, according to the company.
Investor message boards long ago degenerated into a mosh pit of harsh invective and uncorroborated rumor traded between bullish and bearish advocates of specific stocks. Yahoo now offers users the ability to rate individual messages according to a five-star system, then filter out lower-rated postings.
The new Yahoo Finance stock charts, now in public test mode, offer investors a one-click way to compare the performance of a stock to competing companies or indexes.
The full-screen charting application gives users free access to historical stock price data reaching back decades, in an easy-to-use format that provides a "drag-and-drop" ability to switch from a daily timeframe to years of stock chart history.
The structure of stock message boards will provide "threaded" conversations around specific topics tied to a stock, rather than serial discussions that simply list investor messages on different topics in reverse chronological order.
For more sophisticated investors, Yahoo has integrated a variety of technical analysis tools that provide buy and sell signals. For novice investors, Yahoo Finance provides educational information about how to use tools on the site.
Yahoo also announced the launch of a new Web-based offering, named Yahoo Finance Badge, which enables Web publishers—such as bloggers or site operators—to post Yahoo-generated market data from reputable stock exchanges on their own sites, all for free, the AP reports.