StockTwits Gets Stocked

(via s0ren)

Alot written about this today - wow didn’t realize people cared that much - so really not much to add, except that we see production and consumption of content in the middle of a pretty radical shift, one where the modes of production and consumption themselves are collapsing into each other.

I know that I am, for example, reading news (business news in particular) in much different ways these days.  I actually gave up my subscription to the Wall Street Journal recently.  Not because I don’t enjoy the content (I think it’s great), but that I found myself consuming business news and content in a much more efficient, dynamic and enjoyable way.

Using Tweetdeck (and Convomonitor) I created a group of 5 people I was already following but was finding I was doing so primarily for their business insights (I titled this group “Business Channel”):

Gregor Macdonald (@gregormacdonald)
Howard Lindzon (@howardlindzon)
Phil Pearlman (@ppearlman)
Andy Swan (@andyswan)
Andy Finkle (@A-F)
Roger Ehrenberg (@infoarbitrage)

Some of these people I know - and indeed are friends - but most of them I only met by following them.  Each day this group seems to comb the world of business news, via Twitter re-posting stories (many from the WSJ), their own thoughts, links to their own longer form blog pieces, commentary, and a dose of great humor.  And pretty soon I found that by consuming their primary Twitter content I was then consuming pretty much all the relevant business news I had previously getting from the WSJ or other sources.  But it’s not rote following - I interact with them too.  It’s much more fun this way, because the personalities involved are not subservient to the content; indeed they are part and parcel thereto.

This is just my personal use case and thus not highly relevant, except that we believe this way to produce/consume content represents many new ways of creating value.  StockTwits happens to be only a specific case - market information at a micro level but also business commentary on a macro level - but one where we think these new modes may begin to get unlocked, as there already are common symbols used to mark the relevant content (the $ sign for example) and an initial group of power users.  StockTwits is starting with its tie in with Twitter, but very soon next year will expand way beyond that one platform, while still (and always) remaining core to its principles (what Roger calls the “Long Tail Meritocracy”). 

More fundamentally, this represents the intersection of what we believe are the three most important media trends currently occurring: the now web, the context web, and the social web.  As such, we feel pretty lucky to have been involved in StockTwits since it’s inception.