Back in June, Google announced live streaming of news on Google Finance. This “live” financial news stream is located on their market news page of Google Finance, and it’s suppose to run from 8am to 5pm EST, Monday through Friday.
Today, Google wrote an article about the value of real time financial news and how it is helping the industry. I can certainly see how real time, live financial news streams would be invaluable to traders, bloggers, and others that are directly associated with the industry. However when I went to the financial news stream today, the stream was not loading.
I tried viewing the live news stream in several different browsers, but was not able to get a feed.
TechCrunch wrote an article today about the financial news stream, and made a very good point. They stated that from their observation, the updates were only occurring once every minute or two – not the live streaming that was originally promoted by Google back in June of last year.
Live streaming, from my perspective, is what you see on Twitter. When a new update has been published, it will automatically drop down to be read. One great example of live streaming of financial news, stock quotes, and commentary is StockTwits.com.
I think that Google is definitely on the right track with their ambitions to provide real time financial news and data. And admittedly, they claim to have a long way to go with this technology.
From my perspective, getting financial news every minute or two is whole lot better than scouring the web and news feeds for freshly updated content.
This is also just one more example of how the web is making a fundamental shift to “real time”, as opposed to content published, say, 3 hours ago. And it’s also why I think that the true value of Twitter is still a long way in the distance. Twitter has an edge in the marketplace with real time data. Google knows it, Microsoft knows it, Yahoo knows it, and yes… even Facebook knows it – why do you think the 3 major search engines are striking deals to deliver Twitter updates in their search results?
So while you wait for Google to achieve “real time data” and streaming (not 2 or 3 minute old stuff) – just head over to StockTwits.com to satisfy your hunger for real time financial data.