Introducing StreetEYE, My New Secret Link Weapon

Hola! I want to let you guys in on a really sick tool I’ve been using to keep up with the most interesting and important news in finance.  This thing will probably make my own linkfests obsolete one day as it gets better – or maybe the creator will help me develop my own version…we’ll see I guess.

Anyway, it’s called StreetEYE and it’s the brainchild of technology-by-way-of-hedge-fund-industry veteran Druce Vertes.  Druce has built a fully-automated linkfest that works 24 hours a day and is based on the links shared by the Tweeters that he feels are the most important and generous follows in finance.  You’ll see Tadas and Barry and Heidi and Felix on there and a lot of other tweeps who share and RT great links.  It’s kind of like a stripped-down version of the excellent Counterparties engine that hit the scene recently.

I now have StreetEYE as a button on my browser, it helps me get up to speed immensely whenever I resurface from three hours of meetings or when I wake up in the morning.

I asked Druce for some background on what made him build it and where he wants to take it in the future:

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Says Druce:

My goal is to invest knowing as much as possible as quickly as possible using the awesome power of the blogosphere and Twitterverse!

My background – I worked at some hedge funds on their technology. Some pretty big ones, don’t want to drop names, but you can see more here.  Between gigs, I’m doing some mad science experiments.

Being a news junkie, first thing I do in the morning is open Chrome and hit ‘open all bookmarks in one window’. (And then Chrome groans, ‘are you sure you want to open up 26 tabs’.  What, you never saw a guy open 26 tabs before? Just move along.) I think I have a pretty good news gathering process that uses a lot of incredible curators (thereformedbroker.com, ritholtz.com, abnormalreturns.com, dealbreaker.com, nakedcapitalism.com, Felix Salmon at Reuters, a few others but those would be the starting all-star lineup).  Also addicted to reddit, Memeorandum/Techmeme, Hacker News.

So the idea is to automate the process, try to leverage the network in a feedback loop. Pick the starting lineup above, and just start generating a list of the news stories they link to. Then let people upvote the ones that are relevant and promote them from “Latest links” to “Top links.” (got this from Hacker News). Anyone with a Twitter screen name can upvote, but right now, it’s just me and a couple of buddies. Next, I’ll expand the network. See who gets upvoted a lot and who doesn’t. Trim the people who don’t, try to find more people like the ones who do. Eventually it’s a pretty good, fully automated selection process. It just takes one reference for a story to make it to the “Latest links”, but if no one upvotes it or retweets it it will fall out pretty fast.

Maybe I’m doing this  just for me, maybe for a few similar folks, or maybe there’s some potential for a bigger community. Kind of at the stage of gathering feedback, I can see a few directions it could go in.

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Very cool, thanks Druce!  

Check out StreetEYE here