It's Rishi

After about a year of dismissing Twitter as a fad, I realized that it seemed to be gaining more and more momentum. I am receiving more “X is now following you..” emails than ever before and Twitter is finding its way into more of my conversations — both online and offline. While I appreciate the value of Twitter as a communication medium, I recently found a Twitter-based service named StockTwits that revolutionized how I think about Twitter.

StockTwits is a community of people who follow the equity markets and exchange thoughts, via Twitter, about both single names as well as overall market movements. On StockTwits.com, any user can browse all the latest Tweets amongst the community members. Here’s the StockTwits AAPL page:

Now, this concept in and of itself is interesting but not really thought-provoking. However, what I found sort of fascinating is the mechanics of StockTwits. StockTwits users include $[Ticker] in their tweets to let StockTwits know what ticker they are microblogging about. So, for example, “long $RIMM short $AAPL has been a heck of a trade in 09″ indicates to StockTwits that the tweet is relevant to RIMM and AAPL. Because all tweets follow this convention, it is easy for StockTwits to organize the massive number of tweets into channels. In this case, the channel is a single equity name.

Let’s say you started a baseball twittering community. You might create conventions like $[LastName][Jersey#] or $[FirstName][LastName] or whatever.. in fact by applying a bit of intelligence when processing tweets, the system can probably be quite flexible and still correctly resolve player names. The bottom line is that as long as users are OK with including these inline tags in their tweets, systems can then make meaning. Sort of like tagging a post on one’s blog, but the difference being that everyone agrees to use the same set of tags.

In today’s blogosphere, tags are arbitrary. That’s the way it’s always been and this behavior is unlikely to change. The result is that the blogosphere is difficult to aggregate. The only way to create a structure out of related blog posts is through links and trackbacks. While this kind of works (Techmeme is certainly a shining example), there are tons and tons of unlinked posts about the same topic everyday in the blogosphere that, while related, cannot be aggregated.

In contrast, I think there’s a real chance for these twittering tag domains (for lack of a better name for this) to catch on. Tweets don’t really live anywhere per se. Blog posts do…they live on your blog (a web page). Thus, there’s a tendency for people to want to express their blog posts in their own individual way. That means categorizing and tagging the post in their own preferred way. However, for Twitter users to join a conversation on a specific topic, they will need to tag their tweets with a common folksonomy, like we see with StockTwits. Without this concept, a community like StockTwits would be utter chaos.

There’s definitely something interesting about structuring conversations in Twitter. Both for the purpose of making richer experiences for those involved in the same conversation and for the purpose of search/aggregation.