StockTwits in New York Magazine

The Blogfather Howard Lindzon has a quote in a sprawling New York Magazine piece about Twitter…

Twitter, distracted by technology problems and infighting among its founders, was practically the last to understand that curation and filtering is part of its business. At first, it was happy to let users, and start-up developers, take care of it. One of the early attempts to focus Twitter was StockTwits, co-founded by an angel investor named Howard Lindzon. He used the symbol of two dollar signs, $$, as a code that users could add to their tweets, allowing Lindzon to sift for $$-related tweets and invent a separate conversation band for traders and businesspeople. “Curation and discovery is everything,” says Lindzon. “Otherwise it’s the dumbest product you’ve ever seen in your life.”

Consequently, Lindzon has managed to peel away a whole thread of valuable conversation from Twitter. And he wasn’t the only one: TweetDeck, a popular platform for monitoring Twitter, marshaled Twitter’s users into its interface and was on its way to selling ads—until Twitter realized this was its business and paid $40 million to acquire TweetDeck in May. People like Lindzon, whose company is built on Twitter, believe Twitter is an invention akin to TV, an amazing development, but not worth anything without defined channels like his. “They have a TV-radio problem,” says Lindzon. “How do you monetize TV? Nobody remembers who the first CEO of radio or TV was.”

Today’s lunchtime read for sure, head over for the whole story below…

Source:

Tweet Science (New York Magazine)