Yahoo Finance has been a real stand-out feature among Yahoo's various products for almost a decade now. While it continues to be an amazingly valuable feature, some sections within Y! Finance are very overdue for a facelift including the message boards.

One of the biggest problems I've noticed with message boards is the extremely high noise to signal ratio on boards for popular stocks. It's almost impossible to find posts worth reading and filter content that can be ignored. I'm afraid that Yahoo has lost a large percentage of potential daily message board users who simply won't put up with the junk, and are not interested in contributing something interesting to the noise.

I have participated in Yahoo message boards on stocks that have interested me in the past, but only very selectively. I was drawn to boards of companies I found interesting where there was a moderate posting volume I could follow without quitting my day job. The boards of some stocks that interest me, including YHOO and GOOG, are simply impossible to follow on Yahoo Finance due to the extraordinarily high post volumes with no way to find worthy content other than the occasional recommendation for a rare noteworthy post.

For example, the board for YHOO has had over 300 posts in the last twelve hours, and next to nothing interesting has been said. This is really quite sad considering how many interesting things people could be discussing about YHOO on Yahoo's own message board if it was more usable.

Fortunately, it looks like Yahoo's close to launching a significant update to their message board layout. Here are a couple screen shots I grabbed a while back:

Threaded conversations, thread ratings, replied to thread (did it generate a conversation?), who started the thread (was it the usual muckraker?), who posted the most recent contribution to a thread, and filtering for threads by ratings are all welcome enhancements.

Clicking into a thread, I saw this:


New features include a new rating system using AJAX so I don't have to reload the page to rec a post. Profile pictures personalize individual posts, and the threaded posts below makes it easy to follow conversations.

This should mark a significant leap forward for Yahoo, bringing them current with features available on popular message board platforms such as Invision Powerboard and phpBB. While those programs may not scale to Yahoo's user base, it's amazing that Yahoo fell so far behind before deciding it was time to catch back up. Luckily for Yahoo, Google and MSN haven't taken advantage of Yahoo's message board neglect over the past few years.