Twitter to Roll Out Clickable Stock Symbols
The @ and # symbols have been in place on Twitter forever, and until now they've stood alone as the pre-eminent mark-up codes used on Twitter by users. The social network hopes that another symbol will soon be popular amongst users however, as they announce the roll-out of a new symbol for stocks.
If users add a $ to the front of a registered stock symbol, the text is converted into a clickable link. The link doesn't take you to a page showing the latest price however, but instead to a history of conversations around a particular company.
So for instance if you include $GE in your tweet, your followers can then find all tweets containing the same code simply by clicking on it.
Whilst a nice feature it is alas a shame that thus far the feature is only available for companies with a registered stock symbol. So you couldn't include $technorati in a tweet and find all tweets about the site. It does therefore require you to know what the stock symbol for a company is, something which some Twitter employees could clearly use some homework on as they used the wrong one for Apple in their first tweets about the new feature.
This is functionality that is extremely similar to what StockTwits provides on its site, but isn’t as full-featured obviously. Ironically, StockTwits founder Howard Lindzon just sold off the rest of his Twitter shares. Coincidence?
What do you think about this new feature? Is it a valuable extension to the core offering or an unwanted distraction? Let me know in the comments.
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