Twitter is stepping on more toes this week with the rollout of “Cashtags”, which essentially turn stock symbols into clickable hashtags.
Cashtags are created by adding a “$” symbol in front of a stock symbol (also known as a ticker). For example, the cashtag for Apple is $AAPL. By clicking on the cashtag, the user can then view all the conversations around and mentions of that particular company.
The new functionality is extremely similar to that of StockTwits, albeit not as full-featured. CEO and co-founder of StockTwits, Howard Lindzon, writes in a blog post: “It's interesting that Twitter has hijacked our creation of $TICKER, ie $AAPL. It only took four years to 'fill' this hole, though a few months back they told me in a detailed e-mail it was not a hole they wanted to fill.”
Lindzon says StockTwits, however, still beats Twitter's offering in terms of providing context, curation and community.
Lately, Twitter has embarked on a campaign to bring features in-house, improve its own product offering and encourage users to stay with the Twitter ecosystem.
Earlier this month, Twitter released updates to its mobile apps, which included features such as autocomplete search, support for expanded tweets and ambient notifications. Push notifications and ambient notifications in particular, were a selling point for third-party apps like Tweetbot.
At the end of June, Twitter's director of consumer products, Michael Sippey, posted on the site's developer blog that the new features being added by Twitter highlighted the importance of providing “the core Twitter consumption experience through a consistent set of products and tools”.
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