With the NEW Social Finance Graph the Human Ticker Gets MORE Human

  • Posted by
  • on October 21st, 2010

Earlier today we launched a new feature set:  the Ability to Follow Stocks and the new Home Stream.

It’s our view (and that of hundreds of investors of all types we asked) that Watch Lists are too hard.  They are a pain to maintain.  They often get ignored and neglected.  We are all now creatures of  ’sharing’, ‘liking’, ‘friending and of course ‘following’.  On StockTwits we are interested in following people and stocks.

The new Home Stream brings all of that to you with a simple FOLLOW.  Follow a person, follow a stock, and get the information you want, in real time.

While this may not seem all that new at first, I believe it has the potential to be quite powerful as we begin to develop the Social Finance Graph.

Mark Zuckerberg believes that he owns the social graph.  I think there will be MANY social graphs – especially as social networks form around verticals such as finance.  This past weekend Naval Ravikant and Adam Rifkin over at TechCrunch made a great argument on Twitter being undervalued.  One main reason that they give is Twitter being built on a social interest graph – shared interests.  Facebook is who you know, while Twitter/StockTwits is both who you know and what you like/trade/invest in.

They write:

Facebook, as we noted earlier, maintains two separate graphs from the user perspective: a social graph and an interest graph. For most Facebook users, the former is vastly more important than the latte—no one joined Facebook so they could follow Justin Bieber’s Fan Page. Twitter’s graph by contrast is fully interest-based: people use it to stalk celebrities, not to stalk ex-girlfriends from high school.

StockTwits is a network based on social interest.  We are largely a community of people who have NO real life ties but a shared common interest – markets and finance.  We have self organized into various groups largely around asset class, market approach, and time frame.   The ability to follow Stocks adds another layer of interest and gives us a true Social Finance Graph.  Now that stocks are an object to follow, not only will we have a graph based on who is following who, but who is following what.  The Human Ticker gets even MORE Human.  Tickers are socialized.

This has enormous disovery potential.  Here’s a few things I think we can do with the Social Finance Graph:

Now you can wee what stocks your others are following, and who is following your stocks. This is a killer way to find new people and new ideas.  Here’s some of the stocks I’m following.

The Social Finance Graph will enable us to suggest stocks for you to follow based on the people you are following, and vice versa.

  • Break down follow interest of stocks based on profile data.  For example, we will be able to show how many day traders, swing traders, value investors, etc are following a particular stock.
  • List the most followed and unfollowed stocks of the day/week/month, or the top followed stocks that match your trader profile.
  • If you don’t have time to consume StockTwits on our site, we can serve you up email with top tweets, charts, and news from the Stocks you are following.  We can also send you push alerts on our new iPhone app when someone tweets about a stock or, even better, we can alert when a message comes in from BOTH someone you are following and stock you are following.

The possibilities are endless.

Needless to say, we are very excited about this small, but important feature we are adding so please go out there and start following stocks and let us know what you think!

The information in this blog post represents my own opinions and does not contain a recommendation for any particular security or investment. I or my affiliates may hold positions or other interests in securities mentioned in the Blog, please see my Disclaimer page for my full disclaimer.

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