Life after Twitter: StockTwits builds out its own ecosystem
Amit, I've been thinking that ever since Jack's new Twitter API rules.
And I believe Dalton Caldwell has been thinking about that all year. Hence, app.net ...
The real question is whether an open stream needs to be owned by a corporation (like FriendFeed and Twitter before it) or whether it's an open protocol that any corporation can contribute to.
Where is your Open Social now?
It's not a coincidence that this is happening while at the same time Twitpic is shopping itself to be acquired.
The Twitter ecosystem as we know it is over.
The real question I have is whether this makes consumers stop using Twitter.
Or if it's more like the cable company: we complain, but we still pay every month.
the ecosystem has been dead for a long time. Twitter itself can only be killed by twitter.
So essentially, by closing itself off, Twitter has preserved itself?
Both for better and for worse?
LinkedIn is better off without Twitter:
“When Twitter cut us off, we got better, business-focused conversation,” Reid Hoffman said onstage at the TechCrunch: Disrupt technology conference in San Francisco. “From a LinkedIn perspective, it improved the product to lose the Twitter connection.”
More often than not, Twitter = Noise. Remove Twitter, remove noise.
Always have a Plan B. You never know when you'll be turned off.
"So in essence, LinkedIn got what it needed from Twitter — tons of free content flowing through the network for years. Now that LinkedIn is on its feet and riding high with its existing products, however, the loss isn’t as big a deal as it may have once seemed (or at least so Hoffman says)."
Wait, more fragmentation or better verticalization?
The latter isn't necessarily that bad.
It'd be a shame if Twitter couldn't be used for multiple verticals, but their control of the archives and parsing keeps getting in the way. You can't be everything to everybody. They currently, like it or not, the best micro-PR site on the interweb+mobile.
If I was twitter, I'd charge $25k/year for unlimited access to everything. It's high enough to ween out the spammers, but low enough that you could build a fundable biz out of it (my favorite concept as you can tell by my icon--a rising tide lifting a sailing boat, carrying other sailing boats on their way).
The sentiment of crowds is an interesting concept too for stocks. A market price is, after all, just a stochastic for everyone's sentiment of what the fair value should be.
The best part of building your own platform is that you get to innovate:
Up until today, StockTwits' sentiment analysis was based on the text that appeared in users' messages. This morning, StockTwits announced a new sentiment button, which lets users declare themselves as Bulls or Bears when discussing a certain stock. "This is just the first baby step in creating the best source of quantifiable, real-time sentiment data around the markets," says Lindzon.
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