StockTwits has been one of the success stories for building on the Twitter platform. The service, which leverages the power of the Twitter community and its real-time aspect to generate investment ideas, has thousands of people each day now using the $ tags it invented to talk stocks over the network. But to get into the big time in this 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 because Lindzon and fellow co-founder Soren Macbeth created their client with TweetDeck very much in mind, realizing that people would know how to use it (Lindzon is also 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 this app.
Right now, if 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 almost $1,000 a month. But Lindzon sees an opening because the number one feature on Bloomberg Terminals is chat, he tells us. What if 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 this 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 this 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 this really seriously, want to send messages all the time with what they’re trading and maybe 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 people together is particular important in StockTwits Desktop because of the different types of traders. There’s a “Tech” group for example, but also 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 a separate column within the StockTwits Desktop app.
Also built-in to StockTwits Desktop is a web browser. Many AIR apps don’t utilize this functionality, but it’s very useful for getting information 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 information open at once. This can include Twitter Searches, RSS feeds, and charts (from Chart.ly, which StockTwits purchased back in May) among other things.
There is also real-time financial news provided in partnership with SkyGrid. You can easily subscribe to news just about a particular company, or get the firehose of financial information coming to you in a column.
StockTwits Desktop is an impressive client anyway you look at it. If you’re not into financial information, 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, this 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 backbone, and towards having it be simply be one stream that comes into this app, Macbeth says. The plan is to eventually have things like live video content through StockTwit.tv continually flowing into the app (right now, much of it is archived, but some is live). There are also quite a few other plans in the works in terms of new content 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 time to expand beyond relying solely on Twitter. This desktop client and a new website redesign (which will eventually take on many of the desktop app’s features) suggest that is where StockTwits is heading.
Watch the video below for how to sign up for StockTwits Desktop.
And it’s free and better than watching those “pretenders” in CNBC
The app seems impressive, but I feel generally people prefer privacy in trading and share marketing. Think sharing the stock and trading news as Stock Twits will disturb the personal business.
While Bloomberg chat is popular, that is a function of the exclusive nature of the platform. Trying to replicate that success with one which has zero barriers to entry is at best, a non sequitur.
Bad timing.. September is historically the worst month for stock performance. Watch your portfolio evaporate on the real-time web!
Jeff: StockTwits launched last October, one of the worst markets ever. When stocks are crashing, they’re more interesting to talk about.
And if you really knew how to time the market, wouldn’t you be too busy running your hedge fund from your yacht to comment on TechCrunch?
yeah that doesn’t make any sense. Volatile markets, up or down, are when people make money.
Well the app looks good and I am sure it will get good use by non-professional traders who look to add another dimension to their research and who are into crowd sourcing, etc.
The problem is with the pro-traders. First off this type of app would not be allowed in most wallstreet firms as they block any non-secure IM’s as a rule. Also most pro-traders don’t want others to know what they are buying and selling and certainly won’t be recommending stuff to people unless they are a broker looking to drive deal flow to themselves. While I do agree IM on Bloomberg, it is on a secure network and only the target person can see the chat, and most of that chat is to negotiate deals amongst firms. Its a totally different animal. I personally think this app will remain mostly a consumer application, but that’s still a large market and I think they will have success with this.
Congrats guys, this thing really does look impressive, great way to focus on the stocks, industries and fellow traders that YOU want…this is Stocktwits your way…truly useful
thankd for the review MG
So long for twitter the search engine… the tweets that actually carry significant information are pulled away for the stream… and will be mined by a company with a business plan.
app looks good.. but i see a bug on the homepage.. Dates says April instead of September – do any of you see that?
Avi,
Where is this bug that you are seeing with the dates?
Thanks
good catch…bug will be fixed asap
(Disclosure: I’m an investor and Board Member of StockTwits) I’m really impressed with what Soren, Howard et al have built – this is one of the better, if not best, products I’ve seen launched in the past year. The functionality and feature set are very in-tune with the needs of the target. I imagine StockTwits has shared a roadmap for any application/ business vertical focused market. Congrats!
You can find the download page for StockTwits Desktop here http://bit.ly/WN4Jk
We started adding $ to our stock twitters. Got some referrals from Stock Twits; however, I always wonder . . . what is the value prop for users.
I guess that bloomberg terminal thing might work, but there are a bunch of forums out there on Stocks. Twitter is an instant user base I guess.
Should be an interesting startup to follow.
http://www.traderbots.com
>>but there are a bunch of forums out there on Stocks.
many of these forums are littered with spam, penny stock scams, abusive behaviors, etc. at stocktwits we actively monitor the community to contain these negative elements.
Twitter is going to lose traffic to specialty channels like this if they don’t provide groups or some other way to manage your conversation flow.
When I try to navigate to the download page, I get an error saying a connection cannot be established. Anyone else getting a similar problem, or just me?
Looking into the download issue right now.
http://desktop.stocktwits.com is broken. I can’t see the app.
Still down. I wonder if they’ll have a whale-of-fail as a logo.
The downloads and login are now back up and working. Join the financial conversation.
Still down. No conversations flowing.
What will it be the logo? the bear-of-fail or the bull-of-fail
There was a DNS issue that has since been resolved. Please try again. If your still having issues, email feedback@stocktwits.com
Thanks!
Are you sure your website scalates all the incoming demand?
Nah. Nothing yet. What about a mirror?
It won’t go up. Still down. ZZZzzz…
Would you activate some mirrors PLEASE?
working on getting it back up…damn techcrunch traffic
very cool.
Downloads should be back up and running. Had some traffic and name server issues.
what a great idea. twitter can be a launchpad for services like this to grow virally, now that the hype is waning.
Another service that has been brewing related to the stock/financial community that uses Twitter as a supplement, but not a core backbone to its service is http://www.finncialkudos.com which recently launched in private beta. It has a way to go, but it seems like open to keep an eye on in this space as well.
Ooops. I meant http://www.financialkudos.com . Sorry for the typo.
Went through some hurdles to download it. Probably the network effect.
My first impression with the app is disappointment. I’ve only used stocktwits a few times but I do use twitter frequently (although not many of the apps). I found this app to be overly complicated and confusing.
Setup was easy but there were some very basic things I wanted to do (eg. setup my portfolio and automatically get streamed tweets about them). I tried to poke around here and there and it was more pain than pleasure. They should’ve dubbed this Beta and should hire a product manager/interface designer. Sometimes less is more.
I’ve used Bloomberg for years — chat is not that big of a deal as far as I have seen. This would never replace a Bloomberg terminal.