Rating: Keeping track of your stocks on Facebook is a very useful application idea. I have to be honest here, nice first pass by the people at Forbes, but since they were one of the facebook development partners; I would expect this facebook application to have much more functionality. “Forbes.com Stocks addition to Facebook lets you track news on the companies you’re interested in and see which of your friends are tracking the same stocks.”

Seeing which stocks my friends are watching is useful and interesting, and so is seeing the latest, news headlines & charts; but that is where the interaction with my facebook network and on facebook effectively stops.

I like the fact that it allows me to see a list of the latest news headlines news related to a selected company. But it makes me go to Forbes to read that story.

As a facebook user; possibly I would want to keep track of the latest news and have that news display right in my profile or on the canvas page. The fact that I have to leave facebook and go to Forbes for nearly everything irritates me to no end, this makes it feel like it is just a way to pull me to Forbes.com, leaving me a little disappointed. They should integrate the entire experience into the facebook stocks application.

Another shortcoming of this application is that they do not have the ability to search for a company stock ticker symbol. This is very simple to add and would make the application much more useful. You can even add invalid symbol tickers and it takes them… huh? They also limit the amount of stocks that you can display on your profile page to 3, why limit me? Anytime I want the news or earnings I am taken to Forbes.com; why not just integrate this into facebook? This might well explain why this Forbes facebook application only has 8,300 users after 2.5 weeks.

Come on Forbes, you can do better. You can add the Facebook Forbes Stock Application for facebook here.

My profile display of 3 of the 4 stocks that I am tracking. Quote, News and Earnings links all take me back to Forbes.com

Stocks that my friends are tracking

Stocks that I am tracking and the associated charts. Nice. It also displays links back to Forbes for the latest news stories about that company.

Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook stocks, facebook forbes, forbes facebook, forbes, stock tracking, stock news, stock application, facebook application, stock widget

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