Twitter Is The New Bloomberg

Today I stumbled on a twitter account [via @howardlindzon] called @stocktwits. Among other things going on there, they are using the dollar sign (‘$’) preceding corporate ‘tickers’ (stock market acronyms) to set up an index of tweets on each referenced company’s history. Very cool. Example:

RT @s_m_i: Final result of $LEH CDS auction - 8.625 cents on the dollar 11:34 AM Oct 10th from web

To search the index, you need to visit the companion site: www.stocktwits.com. Here’s the search result for $LEH:

StockTwits.com - Real Investors. Real Ideas. Real Time., originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Stocktwits recasts the historic financial networks in the context of Twitter, the leading example of open social microstreaming. It demonstrates just how the integration of a simple convention — like ‘$’ for tickers or ‘#’ for hashtags — paired up with relatively commonplace indexing and a page for the search results, creates a loose shared space for all those interested in $LEH (or #web2summit).

[Geek aside: Note that the confluence of Lehman watchers leads to the creation of a new stream: the RSS feed coming out. This shift from Twitter stream to RSS is perhaps by design, but may also reflect the hall-of-mirrors effect from putting metadata in the text, so creating a Twitter account for each ticker (www.twitter.com/LEH) for example), and retweeting everything tagged with $LEH through it, would lead to chaos.]