With Its Desktop App, StockTwits Grows Up…And Away From Twitter
September 1, 2009 ·Filed Under Technology News
StockTwits has been one of the success stories for building on the Twitter platform. The service, which leverages the potential of the Twitter community and its real-time aspect to generate investment ideas, has thousands of humans each day now using the $ tags it invented to talk stocks by the network. But to get into the big duration in that field, co-founder Howard Lindzon knew the service had to go to the next level. And now it is with StockTwits Desktop.
If you’ve used TweetDeck, StockTwits Desktop will be very familiar to you. That’s considering Lindzon and fellow co-founder Soren Macbeth created their client with TweetDeck very much in mind, realizing that humans would know how to use it (Lindzon is additionally an investor in TweetDeck). But StockTwits Desktop’s functionality extends far beyond that of TweetDeck, as what it’s really doing is creating an entire investor ecosystem within that app.
Right now, whether investors really want to get serious about stock trading professionally, they buy a Bloomberg Terminal. Unfortunately, those run you around $2,000 a month. Thomson Reuters offers a competing system, but that will still cost you nearly $1,000 a month. But Lindzon sees an opening considering the number one feature on Bloomberg Terminals is chat, he tells us. What whether you could open up a free forum to the tens of millions of regular day traders out there? That’s really what StockTwits has always been about.
And that new Adobe Air-based app gives them the terminal from which to do it while intermixing the very casual traders with the more serious folks. Lindzon envisions that as the “Social Bloomberg” or the “Facebook for Finance.” But it has always been kind of hard to get the more hardcore financial folks to take a service seriously when it is tied to Twitter, with its famous un-reliability issues. So StockTwits has built up an entire backend that is wholly separate from the messaging service. Yes, StockTwits is slowly breaking away from the service that inspired its name.
Using StockTwits Desktop, by default, you don’t send anything to Twitter. Instead, you use the same basic ideas behind Twitter to communicate with a financial community. Of course, you can still send the messages to Twitter (there’s a CC: box that you check to easily do that), but plenty of users who take that really seriously, want to send messages all the day with what they’re trading and perhaps don’t want all of those to go out to every person they follow on Twitter.
The features you’d expect from a desktop client are all here. But grouping folks together is specific fundamental in StockTwits Desktop considering of the different types of traders. There’s a “Tech” group for example, but additionally a “Natural Gas” group. These groups are populated with users considered to be well versed in those fields, and any other users are free to follow them, which will open up
Also built-in to StockTwits Desktop is a web browser. Many AIR apps don’t utilize that functionality, but it’s very useful for getting knowledge quickly, since you don’t have to leave the app. Instead, another tab opens with a full-fledged browser inside.
Speaking of tabs, while you’re probably used to seeing various columns in the TweetDeck application, StockTwits Desktop has tabs on top of columns, to allow you to have a lot of info open at once. that can include Twitter Searches, RSS feeds, and charts (from Chart.ly, which StockTwits purchased back in May) among other things.
There is additionally real-time financial news provided in partnership with SkyGrid. You can easily subscribe to news just about a specific company, or get the firehose of financial knowledge coming to you in a column.
StockTwits Desktop is an impressive client anyway you look at it. whether you’re not into financial data, it’s feature set is probably overkill, but the grouping experience mixed with the in-app browser is pretty killer. And for the StockTwits junkies, that will be heaven. It’s like a terminal, but free (unless you are a member of one of the StockTwits Network Premium authors, which cost varying amounts, but usually are in the $50 a month, or $400/$500 a year-range).
Those subscription bloggers are already bringing in some revenue for StockTwits, but the real key seems to be diversification. StockTwits is serious about moving away from having Twitter as its spine, and towards having it be simply be one stream that comes into that app, Macbeth says. The plan is to eventually have things like live video substance through StockTwit.tv continually flowing into the app (right now, much of it is archived, but some is live). There are plus quite a few other plans in the works in terms of new substance to pipe into the app, they note.
Twitter has taken StockTwits places. On August 25, the company got to ring the closing bell on NASDAQ. But to go to the next level, and rope in more serious investors to become a viable business (and potentially much more), it may be duration to expand beyond relying solely on Twitter. that desktop client and a new website redesign (which will eventually take on many of the desktop app’s features) propose that is where StockTwits is heading.
Watch the video below for how to sign up for StockTwits Desktop.
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