Dow Jones Debuts MarketWatch Community Beta

Another big presence on the Web is starting to get social. Its selling point: its proximity to the goings on of Wall Street.

MarketWatch, a significant finance-centric presence on the Internet, held under the dominion of Dow Jones (now a Murdoch-owned kingdom), is announcing its beta of a new site. It is one that will operate parallel to its news pages, and one which puts “community” members in charge of deciding what’s hot and what’s not (apologies for the poor rhyme; it slipped out), whether it be a particular story or a particular stock.

The new site, appropriately dubbed MarketWatch Community, maintains some of the look and feel of its parent, whilst offering users an easy way to offer feedback on published pieces and share with fellow members their favorite ticker symbols of the moment. There are of course plenty such locations that offer much the same Web 2.0-like experience – AOL’s widely read Blogging Stocks is one of many – but considering many following the Street on the Web do in fact see MarketWatch as a trusted source for facts and figures and insight and analysis, it seems only natural that Dow Jones put together a social venue of its own to keep more people around for a greater portion of their day.

There’s plenty of stuff included in MarketWatch Community that those attuned to the social side of the Internet will quickly latch onto. Tags and comments are ever-present accoutrements at the site, as is a user-controlled Hot Picks page. (The top five show up on the Community’s front page.) Also, if one is interested in the views and picks of particular site members, one can easily request that they be added to a Friends list, allowing for quick access to recommended posts and stocks and such.

On the whole, MarketWatch Community appears to be a fairly well-sculpted first draft of a social site for Dow Jones. It’s got just about all of the crucial components that can give it real chance at success. And while it could do with some cleaning up, I can foresee quite a few MarketWatch loyalists taking to the new establishment without much effort at all.

Some might wonder why MarketWatch didn’t just infusing its existing domain with some of the social pieces that went into the Community site, but it’s worth point out that doing so would’ve been a very bad move on Dow Jones’ part. Most of MarketWatch’s readership likes things the way they are. Changing the whole thing around in a way that might not fly with a great many people wouldn’t bode well for the site’s future. Better to keep MarketWatch Community a somewhat separate entity so as to keep things peaceful and gauge the response to the release among the member core without intruding on an already well-accepted space.

What do you think?