Geezeo is trying to help the average person manage their personal finances online. Following our glowing write-up last month on their competitor Mint (which took home the top prize at the TechCrunch40 event), Geezeo gets a quick mention today for being the first social finance site to add investment accounts to users’ online finance portfolios.

Geezeo, based in Framingham, Mass., has also inked a partnership with the Motley Fool to integrate that group’s CAPS stock rating service.

These “social” personal finance sites are based around the idea that there’s a lot to learn about spending and saving money when a group of people share data and other information about their finances, anonymously or otherwise. Each startup in the space has its own idea of how that works. Geezeo and and similar startup Wesabe employ a bunch of ideas from social networking. Mint, for now, isn’t much of a social personal finance site, but it does offer a personal finance blog and forum where users can read posts and chat with each other about money issues.

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Are you sick and tired of phishing attacks, those fraudulent emails designed to look like trusted corporations but aimed at stealing your personal account information? Today Yahoo (YHOO), together with eBay (EBAY) and its PayPal unit, started to roll out an authentication technology called DomainKeys that supposedly blocks malicious, fake eBay and PayPal messages from being delivered into the inboxes of Yahoo Mail users by allowing Internet Service Providers to automatically decide if messages should be delivered.

Speaking of PayPal, the company has teamed up with News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace to “virally fundraise” for nonprofits and politicians on the social networking site. PayPal has developed “fundraising badges,” which are basically widgets that are a bit fancier than the typical PayPal “donate” button that could be copied onto any site to inspire philantrophy via the Internet.

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Zoho threw a jab at Google’s (GOOG) suite of online office applications with today’s release of its free database app, Zoho DB & Reports. Zoho’s latest offering brings the number of its online office applications to 13, an impressive attempt in the company’s bid to become the ubiquitous online office suite provider.

With competition from the likes of Google, Microsoft (MSFT) and Adobe (ADBE), we wonder how much the company’s lack of brand awareness will hurt it in the long run. However, if Zoho continues to innovate at top speed, it might make a smart acquisition target, perhaps for one of its competitors.

Zoho DB, at first glance, is reminiscent of Microsoft Excel, but a closer look reveals a database application more like Access. The SQL-based database supports importing and exporting from a bunch of different format types, and also makes it easy to make charts, summary views, and table views. Thanks to the online functionality, all this information can be shared with anyone across the web.

Earlier this week, Adobe entered the online office game with its acquisition of Virtual Ubiquity, a Waltham, Mass.-based startup behind online word processor Buzzword. Meanwhile, Microsoft just unveiled its Office Live Workplace, a web-based feature of its office suite that will let people access and share their documents online.

Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, following rumors last week that the software giant is considering an investment that would value the social networking company at $10 billion, is saying the craze for social networks such as Facebook risks being exposed as a “fad.”

I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.

Facebook is also built on technology that “dozens of people could write in a couple of years,” he told Times Online. On the other hand, he suggested that the combination of the well-known brand and the community of more than 40 million users has some value.

But is Facebook destined to become a fad? I don’t think so.

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Yahoo (YHOO) rolled out some major upgrades to its search engine today. Dubbed “Search Assist,” the addition to the interface integrates audio, video, and photos directly into search results. The updated search also features “suggestions” that actively guess what you’re about to search for when you type in a few letters of your query.

Yahoo’s search traffic is on the decline as competitor Google (GOOG) gains momentum. Yahoo captured 19.9 percent of total search market share in August, down from 24 percent in August 2006, according to Neilsen/NetRatings. Meanwhile, Google claimed 53.6 percent of search market share in August, up from 50.2 percent in the same month the prior year.

MySpace President Tom Anderson posted a blog last week detailing a bunch of recent changes to the site. The new features lead me to believe that the company is finally starting to realize that Facebook, with its anti-spam features, clean-cut layout, and growing traffic figures, might be on to something.

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