Twitter Stock Community Called StockTwits Gets Funding

Posted on December 20, 2008

VentureBeat reports that two-month-old StockTwits has raised a round of funding. The company makes it easy to track discussion of individual stocks on Twitter.

Basically, StockTwits is a sort of social hub for people who want the most up-to-date information on the stock market. You sign up for the site, and any tweet (a Twitter message) that you send out will show up on the site's homepage, provided the tweet has a dollar sign next to a stock symbol. So if you were to tweet "I think you fools are undervaluing $AAPL," that message will show up on the homepage and all the other StockTwit users will see it. They can respond and start following you on Twitter - if you're good, they might tell their Twitter followers to follow you as well. This way, the site serves a clearinghouse for sharing news articles, investment strategies and other helpful information.

StockTwits also provides information for individual stocks including the latest quote and the most recent tweets. For example, here is StockTwits' page for Google. PaidContent writes that the funding round was $800,000.

There has already been at least one successful business venture that relied on Twitter's API. That is Summize which was sold to Twitter and became Twitter search. Summize was able to sell itself to Twitter but future Twitter-based services will likely have to find success in other ways.