Reuters Planning Financial Social Network
Posted on March 2, 2007
The Guardian reports that Reuters is about to enter the social networking race with a niche subscriber-only social network for people for in the financial industry including "fund managers, traders and analysts."
Reuters hopes to draw from the 70,000 subscribers of its messaging service as a starting point for its foray into the fast-growing sector of community websites.The Fast Company Weblog asks if Reuters will call the new service MyMoney. A few other blogs like Paid Content are pointing out Reuters continued interest in new media such as its Second Life news center. Rex Hammock says social networks are a feature and not a product. This does seem to be the case as many media companies are launching social networks as add-ons to existing services and websites."You will see us, later in the year, launch a version of MySpace for the financial services community," said the chief executive, Tom Glocer. "It won't have the latest hot videos and the 'why I am into Metallica and the Arctic Monkeys' blogs. Instead we are going to give our financial services users the ability to post their research or if they are traders, their trading models."
The website will also be exclusive to Reuters subscribers. "People don't want to have 100 friend requests from teenage girls in Florida if they are trading the credit derivatives market, but they probably are interested in being able to share research," said Mr Glocer.