QBFI

Long-time readers of this column know I have a stake in Quickbrowse.com, and have enjoyed watching it develop. It’s still at an early stage, but last week’s Christian Science Monitor OnLine compared it, lightheartedly, with the invention of the light bulb. And quite a few of you use one of its features — Q-Page — to get this column delivered every weekday morning. (Sorry about Monday, by the way. I thought I had posted a sentence saying my weekend had been “too eventful to get a column done.” But apparently, it had been too eventful even for me to click the right button to post that sentence.)

Anyway, today I offer the early adopters among you the world’s very first look at, and free use of, QBFI — Quickbrowse for Investors.

I could explain why this is so great, but just go see for yourself.

It’s a lot more intuitive than Quickbrowse has been (we’re fixing that). And although you’ll find it’s still not completely ready for prime time, it does work — or should anyway. If there are a few stocks you particularly like to follow, enter their symbols separated by commas (amzn,cool,rosi) and then include messages among the other things you select, like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal (for which you must first have passwords) . . . and the point is, you can set it up so that every morning there’s an e-mail waiting for you with all the latest messages on your stocks, and all the headlines from the papers, and an easy way to “browse” through it all.

If you’re not an early adopter, wait a while until we have all this running like a Swatch. But it can’t hurt to take a Quick look.