The public beta of StockTwits Desktop was released earlier today. In doing so, StockTwits has staked out some pretty interesting territory.
When StockTwits was initially launched last year, it was simply aggregating tweets by ticker symbol. During the past year, StockTwits has developed a robust community of more than 75,000 active traders, and wth the launch of StockTwits desktop, they've cut the umbilical cord to Twitter.
At first glance, the new StockTwits desktop resembles TweetDeck (no surprise, since StockTwits co-founder Howard Lindzon is a TweetDeck investor). But rather than simply a fancy Twitter client, StockTwits Desktop is an extensible desktop application that allows users to pull in Twitter feeds, RSS feeds and custom feeds of news, charts and more. When you post on StockTwits Desktop you can choose to tweet to both Twitter and the StockTwits desktop, or just to the desktop. There's also a channel to access StockTwits TV. StockTwits Desktop has support for Groups, though there are only a handful of groups right now.
StockTwits Desktop uses a tab interface to help you manage all the streams of information. Barry Ritholtz describes it as a “social Bloomberg” meets an iTunes Music Store for finance. There are numerous well-thought-out features, such as the ability to click a link and automatically launch a browser within a new tab of this Adobe Air app.
On initial release, StockTwits Desktop is a robust application, bringing together the best of community and RSS reading, but that's just the start. StockTwits Desktop has been designed to support permissioning for premium content streams. The StockTwits vision is for StockTwits Desktop to become an "unbundled Bloomberg" for active investors. While StockTwits Desktop is not going to push Bloomberg off institutional desktops, with the right content streams, an a-la-carte approach could be compelling for individual traders who are not in position to spend $1,500 per month for a Bloomberg.
In the coming years, I expect a number of providers to carve out vertical market niches around Twitter. StockTwits has taken bold steps with a foothold in the financial information space. And with the new StockTwits Desktop, it has given itself the flexibility to move beyond Twitter.
The StockTwits Desktop is available for download.
