Business Idea

I've been seeing an explosion of location-based, facebook/twitter-integrated companies emerge lately, all seemingly trying to make our lives more fruitful by having us know everything about where our 'friends' are, what they are doing, and recommendations they give us about places to stay, eat, etc. To me, this is little more than a cooperative message board organized in a presentable way. Aside from reducing the workload that spies and government agencies might have in figuring things out about people, these types of services will inevitably change the way businesses operate, hasten the time it takes a given business to be ultimately successful or fail, and allow people to not have to think or explore options for themselves. However, if used wisely, they can be used as a quick second opinion or filter to obvious decisions (e.g., "this hotel is well known for seedy visitors frequenting in and out around at 2AM, so don't go there with your family"). A better service might actually tally recommendations from people in different networks so as to prevent group-think or the need to fit in by either all being about something or totally trashing something.

So the question arises, why isn't there a service that includes financial information about institutions that's just brutally honest, with inputs from various sources? This could extend to many things - personal experiences with financial advisers and their rates of return, track records of stock analysts vs. outcomes, CEO incomes or longevity vs. their ability to create American jobs, etc. You know, things that people might actually care about and be able to use as a metric of how to invest, who to support, etc. Unfortunately, there could be a lot of rumor mongering and straight up lies fabricated to bring down people and institutions if such a service were to take off.

What might be more practical is to enable a feature that takes published information and draws conclusions based on trends. That way you can prevent yourself from being used for libel and so forth. Also useful might be to be able to rate users giving advice based on some sort of 'trustability' factor, Ebay-style. Aside from my take on financial news that I elaborated on in my previous post, one thing I've found glaringly lacking in the world of financial world is information on past performance. You see disclaimers about how past performance is not an indication of future results, but why not have solid information about this anyway? For example, if Silverman Saks (a fictional bank) says that Apple stock is going to reach $400 the day after some bad news afterhours (like Steve Jobs retiring), why should the public believe this hype if their track record shows otherwise? Or what about an analysis of the statements that the likes of Paulson, Geitner, and Bernanke have made in the past versus what actually transpired in the economy? Should we start buying stocks just because the Fed chairman says things are going fine? As in my previous post, I think we the people could save ourselves some financial pain in the long run by simply being better informed of facts. Boy would that would have been nice during the go-go days of the housing boom, when the basics of a ARM weren't even well understood. One way to do this might be to create more businesses that empower people with useful, actionable information rather than simply enable more entertainment and travel social-media features.