I always love when I get user interaction. Granted, Marc Hedlund isn’t exactly a disinterested party when it comes to the subject of Wesabe. However, he didn’t really know whether my comments were going to be constructive or scathing On a side note, comments on my blog are great. One, because they’ll make me feel better about the site and two, because I’ll actually know what to talk about going forward.

Some of you may have heard of the website Wesabe. It fashions itself as the Web 2.0 entree into the personal finance category and from what I’ve seen its made some headway. It actually has a blog that deals with some personal finance issues, as well as general “unbiased” promotion for topics on the Wesabe site. So its done some good, but not nearly enough. It should be doing so much more and is nowhere near what anyone would term as a success.

What should be done?

10 Improvements:

1. Make it fun! - Think more like a social network and less like a personal finance website. Make it easy for users to friend each other and interact. Tally the people with large feeds. Promote them and make them famous.

2. Account info - Let people enter manually if they feel like it. Why not? They’re the ones entering it and they like to control their information. Promote the automated solutions, allow the manual.

3. Provide tips from the outset - When a user signs up, shower them with personal finance tips. Maybe it won’t be targeted, but it will be effective. They’ll see that the site has something to offer and won’t walk away right after sign-up.

4. Make superstars! - I touched on it with tabulating the popular RSS feeds, but go a step further. Add a category for total wealth and start tabulating that. Allow people to make it public or private, but allow them to get in on the rankings. You’ll be surprised at what people will tell you. If they’re not interested, you’ll find out. Give them the option.

5. Integrate the mobile phone - Add the option to SMS reminders, tips, etc… to the mobile phone. This will make it more useful to the user. If its too much of an invasion, the user won’t use it. Period.

6. Widgetize! - Allow people to pull their tips, account info, wealth, feeds, etc… into a widget that integrates into the popular social networks. Use MySpace for what’s it there for and let it drive traffic back to your site. The more exposure, the more traffic.

Ok, that’s six, but who’s counting

I’ll be talking more about this later, but I think there’s a TREMENDOUS opportunity for some of the financial services companies out there to drive more traffic and more usage and more stickiness to their sites. They’ve started with features like online bill payment, but they haven’t gone “Web 2.0.” The first one to do it, will see major benefits. That’s why Wesabe has so much potential. It’s the uber-aggregator, that right now stands as the fair-aggregator of its times.