Crowd sourcing to beat the market: the new tag “$” on Twitter

Thanks to Wired, I know now what “$” and “#” mean in Twitter-nese. Yes, I am a N00b…

The enigmatic title “On Twitter, $ Is the New #” serves as a test: If you have to ask, I guess this is not meant for you…

I am ashamed to admit that I didn’t know about the search.twitter URL until I read the Wired blog. How handy. Now I know why so many Tweets had a “#” within them. Duh.

Vanity search-ers now have a new venue and new obsession also, I guess.

I like how Twitter is explained as a distributed social network rooter in SMS, yet larger than SMS:

“Though Twitter has roots in the world of text messaging, it’s a distributed network. Your tweets are broadcast, and what may feel like a one-to-one communication is actually one-to-many. This enormity of scale has made it easy for individual tweets to blossom into wide-reaching conversations, but it’s also made those conversations much more difficult to follow.”

So if you want to talk about a particular publicly traded company on Twitter, just add “$” in front of the company’s ticker, e.g. $GOOG. And a company is already utilizing this, or at least attempting to. The idea that Piqqem has is intriguing to say the least:

They have “urged Twitter users to adopt the dollar sign tag in order to help it keep track of how people on the web are feeling about a particular company’s stock. The plan is to use that data to beat the market and give more informed trading advice.” Sourcing the wisdom of the crowd.

It is going to be a very interesting experiment: stuff that researches and dissertations are made of, IF they survive long enough to get enough attention.

In addition, I am curious to see how many Twitter followers Piqqem has. As the writing of the Wired blog, there were 185. Now there are 190. No, 191, since I just followed them also.

3 thoughts on “Crowd sourcing to beat the market: the new tag “$” on Twitter

  1. Hawaiirama

    Apologized b/c I have a corporate blogger ID but hadnt’t set it up as an OpenID and…anyway, some things are WAY More complicated than they should be. We’re up to 270 followers. Did you gou to the site and sign up to use the full-version on the Web? It’s pretty cool, too. Would love your feedback. Thanks!

    Reply
  2. The Absence of Alternatives

    Great job so far, and intriguing concept. I see you picking up Twitter followers too. Not sure why you apologized for your blogger ID. It’s cool. But I did get blocked by some other blogger from leaving comments on his blog because of MY previous ID “Suburban Mom”, probably didn’t jive with his Web 2.0 image, but I am sure he would have been cool with an ID “Suburban Dad”, so…

    Reply
  3. Hawaiirama

    Thanks for following us on Twitter and for blogging on Piqqem (and hopefully for signing up for Piqqem, too?). Any feedback as you get more into Twitter as a stock info tool would be awesome — Alex from Piqqem (trapped in Hawaiirama as a blogger ID on this post thanks to MT – sorry about that).

    Reply

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