Google Finance is tight–but will they get into the content business? ( look for Yahoo to increase content offering)

Google has been working on Google Finance for a while now and today the wrapper came off and it’s great. They Google Mapped the charts, as we all expected, and they are even leveraging some Flash (still trying to figure out why Flash is getting beaten by AJAX–cost? ease of use?)

JBAT makes note that they will have paid moderators, which he sees as the first sign that Google is getting into the editorial business. Google, of course, has taken a hard line from inception that they are not in competition with their content providers who run Google Adsense. However, Google Finance will certainly give pause to finance partners who run Adsense. Those partners have to now ask themselves “by running adsense are we supporting our competitor?“

This will of course push Yahoo more in the content business–look for Yahoo Finance to keep increasing their origional content offering. Yahoo has backed off claims they are not in the origional content business over the past year, and it’s pretty obvious they are moments away from taking on Marketwatch, ThStreet.com, and WSJ: http://finance.yahoo.com/columnist/allbios

Om Malik thinks it’s OK at best.

I have to say the charts are very impressive, in the same way GMAIL and Google Maps were impressive when they came out, but I’m sure everyone will update their charts in the next three to six months to catch up. For me the best part is that Google has included a Blog Posts section (image right)–wow, blogs as an information source for finance informtion–that’s kind of bold, I wonder if Yahoo will do the same?

Update: They have a Weblogs, Inc. profile… neat. I wonder who put this together?

Update2: Jeff points out the Google, for the first time, has licensed content–something is happening here, and we all know what it is.