What are the best sites for learning about Wesabe? We’ve started with these. What else should be here?
1. Wesabe – Web-based community provides users with personal financial tracking tools and encourages the sharing of tips and experiences. (www.we…

One of the things I see as a valuable feature for Wesabe is the contextual financial tips, read more at http://www.moneysmartlife.com/2006/11/19/what-wesabe-learned-from-google-adsense

I’m one of the co-founders of Wesabe. Thanks much for the long and thoughtful write-up. Maybe this will surprise you, but I agree with much of what you say above.

Let me deal with the easy parts first:

1. You’re right that our privacy policy needs to be better. We put a lot of thought and time into our “Data Bill of Rights” (you can find it on the “security” page off our our home page, and I wrote about it recently on blog.wesabe.com), but I’d have to admit that the privacy policy isn’t where I want it to be today. There’s nothing nefarious in the current policy — it just isn’t as cleanly and strongly stated as I’d like. I wrote one of my friends about this on the day of launch asking for help on improving the policy, and have gotten what seems like excellent advice for people who can help us improve the policy.

That said, I think your suppositions about the current policy are overstated. We say very clearly in the FAQ that we do not intend to run ads on our site. If you look through my posts on radar.oreilly.com/marc, you’ll see that I spend a lot of time ranting about how much I hate ads. “Trust me” isn’t a good response to this concern — a strong privacy policy to back up our already strong data rights policy is — but I think I’ve said a lot in public for a long time now that at least points to my intentions.

2. You’re absolutely right that registration shouldn’t be required for viewing anything on the site. The reason we didn’t do this for launch was….privacy! We wanted to make sure that the aggregate data we display was correctly protected before opening it up to the public. We haven’t gotten a single complaint on this front, and we have every intention of making tips, goals, and a new feature that isn’t launched yet publicly viewable without registration in the near future. Launching a product is often best done by choosing the essential core to launch first, and while we believe public browsing is important for a lot of reasons, including letting people get their feet wet, we thought the essential core was helping people who want to use the service for managing their money.

That’s the easy stuff, since I think we agree. There are two areas in your post where I disagree, one where I think I can convince you and one where I may not.

I think aggregate financial data on our site today is more interesting than truly useful — as you say, comparing yourself to others is not immediately the best way to make financial decisions. Over time, though, I think you’ll find this to be incredibly helpful. Some examples: it turns out that auto shop in Berkeley (where I live) with the highest average price is also the lowest rated, and that the highest rated is *less than half* the cost. Auto shop prices are not transparent in the consumer market — there’s no place you can go to find out how much you should expect to spend at an auto shop. Of course an auto shop for Mercedes and an auto shop for Kias are going to have different price points because of their respective markets, but if you can compare the price and satisfaction for the Kia shops in your area, you have a *lot* more data to go on than you do now.

There are numerous other examples of this, which we’ll make more prominent on our site as we have more data to use. Do people go to this restaurant once and never come back? Probably a bad bet. Do they go every week? Probably a neighborhood favorite. How does time of year affect the price for new cars? What are the tips that work best for people with my spending patterns? How much of my income should I expect to spend on housing if I live in this area versus this other area?

I think over time, as we have more data to show and better tools with which to show it, you’ll come around on this. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that aggregating data to help consumers get better values is enormously powerful, both in making the market more transparent, and in giving people real data on which to build their budgets and goals.

The area where we probably won’t agree is on whether what we’re doing is innovative. We definitely love what 43things.com has done, and definitely developed our Goals section with their work in mind (as we say in our FAQ), but we do not intend to replace their site or get people to use us instead of them. I felt that their site, because it is oriented on general goals, did not have the feature I needed to reach my financial goals, since I think financial goals require specific tools, which we’ve tried to add. Take a look at the Targets feature in Goals, and I think what you’ll see is not present on 43things nor any other site; likewise, the way we match Tips to goals is something we developed. If you mean to say that we did something similar to 43things, I completely agree; if you mean we just knocked off their site, I don’t agree. There are some features that start on one web site and spread to others, which is exactly what happened with tags after they were introduced on del.icio.us — now they’re everywhere, including our site. I think having tools specific to financial goals is both necessary and different.

On the Digg comparison, I’m a little more surprised — yes, we have a way to say “I like this tip” (save to favorites) but it seems pretty different than Digg to me. Of course we look at other sites and see how they do things, but that feature is more directly similar to Flickr’s “Save to Favorites” than to anything on Digg. I like the way Flickr allows you to keep track of photos you like and then displays information about that; I think Digg’s and Reddit’s “voting” systems are great for their sites but not right for ours. Of course we look at other sites for ideas about what works and what doesn’t work for people, but to say that we knocked off Digg because we let people say they like a tip seems wrong to me. I don’t know of anywhere else where you can get financial tips matched to your personal spending, and I think that’s truly innovative and useful.

Sorry for the long response, but I thought your post was very thoughtful and reasonable, and I wanted to give it the same kind of response. If there’s anything more you want me to address, just let me know.

Thanks,
Marc