Fri 25 Apr 2008
Making Our Dollars Talk
Posted by Shane under Other
No Comments
Last year, when our home briefly went without Microsoft Windows in our unsuccessful Mac experiment, one of the applications I had the most difficult time replacing was Microsoft Money. I had been using it for 3+ years to track our net worth and experiment a little with budgeting. I tried using Quicken for the Mac, which came installed with our MacBook, but it was a big step backwards. It was far more tedious than MS Money. I wanted to make my life easier and spending 50% more time balancing our accounts and tracking expenses was not the direction I wanted to go.
Enter Wesabe.
I was an early adopter for Wesabe, but hadn’t really used my account since I had first signed up. When I took my second go at it, the user community was much larger, and thus the benefits of social collaboration were more apparent. For example, entering data was a snap because over half of my merchant ids — which I see on my transactions — had already been cleaned up.
Last week, they made another step forward in building value on top of their user data: better merchant reviews. Tying transaction amounts to reviews ties together two data points in a unique mix that vastly improves their recommendation engine.
I have not done much rating on Wesabe until now, but I will start to contribute now that I see the value I can get out of this community tool.