What’s a Twitter?

Twitter, the short message, micro-blogging website, is loved and hated, but mostly misunderstood I think. I love to use twitter to talk to, keep in touch and learn more about my friends, but to be honest, of my close friends on twitter, I have all their email addresses, most of them I spam on Blackberry Messenger and I know I could Facebook message anyone of them. If worst came to worst, I’m sure I could pick up a phone and actually call them. So as a communication tool for keeping in touch with your friends, Twitter is by no means indispensable.

But Twitter is more than messaging, I frequently learn where my friends are, what they are doing, how hungover they are and so on. But again, with most of them, I’d learn anything notable anyway when we got together next. Now maybe their chicken dinner on Tuesday wouldn’t come up, or maybe I wouldn’t know how bored they are on Wednesday, but they’d probably share the story about their office closing early due to too much drinking at the company party, or they might send me a funny link via email instead. So while I utilize twitter as somewhat of a tracking device on my friends, again really, I don’t think that’s where I get the most value from my Twitter Feeds.

Twitter, its true value and its future is to me, Stocktwits. Stocktwits is a community base service built on top of the Twitter platform. As with most great ideas, the fundamentals are simple and elegant. Basically Stocktwits monitors the Twitter-verse and scans for Twitters (I know they are called tweets but I hate that word) that have a $XYZ (where XYZ is a ticker symbol, e.g. $F, $SPY, $LEH (uhhhh?) ) or a “$ $” for posts about the economy in general and aggregates these twitters into one site. Now I’m not a trader, but I try to follow the economy closely and what’s amazing about stocktwits is that it provides instantaneous access to the true zeitgeist. It’s better than watching CNBC or FBN, or even Bloomberg, because it taps directly into what people are trading, doing, thinking and so on. I’ll probably never make an investment directly off a stocktwit meme, but I know that I understand the markets and investing better for following it and that knew knowledge impacts every financial move I can make.

Stocktwits is more than a gauge of opinion, it’s a community, and that’s where it’s integration with Twitter really pays off. I’m a passive stocktwits user, I’ve made a few observations, but most of the time I spend listening, I’ve listened to some really smart people, and some really dumb people, I like listening to both, but the smart people I typically begin to follow off stocktwits, people like Howard Lindzon, Soren Macbeth, David Buffalo, Eric Bolling, Dasan, and InfoArbitrage. Reading these guys twitters is better than reading their blogs, because twitter is a conversation, to follow the back and forths of smart, engaging and amusing people is part of the whole conversational aspect of the internet that is so key to its value. It’s with this service and with these guys that I get the true indispensable value out of Twitter.

There are other services similar to stocktwits, some that I am aware of, like @LOTD for music, and many others that I’m sure I’m not, but I think that these services are the key for the health growth and expansion of twitter. And if you’re a casual or reluctant twitter user, I encourage you to go out and find a community, I think that it opens doors on to the value of the service that are really neat.

Oh and if you’re looking for people to follow, give us a shout out at @awatterson, @mklear, @michaelprassel @studentnerds and let us know you’re out there.