Twitter = Discovery

As you may have read, Stocktwits just closed its Series A round with True Ventures. Tony Conrad, of Sphere and WordPress fame, will be joining Howard, Soren and I on the Board. I am very excited about our new partner, and know that Tony’s entrepreneurial IQ and product development expertise will be a huge asset to the Stocktwits team.

I have shared my views about Twitter in the past, and have only become more wedded to the ecosystem through my investments in TweetDeck and bit.ly. Given the passage of time and my greater intimacy with the medium, I decided to do a re-read of my “foundation” post of October 2008 titled Twitter: Monetize the Apps, not the Platform. Here is an extract from that post; it still accurately reflects my feelings about Twitter, its promise and its shortcomings:

I love Twitter because of its immediacy, the “one to many” concept
and the fact that culturally, so many of those on Twitter monitor and
manage their messages with a vigilance far exceeding that of email.
This is its power at the most basic level. But when you think of
creating communities around Twitter, be they related to companies,
brands, entertainers, common interests, politics, etc., it is easy to
see the massive power that can be harnessed pretty quickly.

So
what do you need? Groups. Perhaps human-curated groups. With
hierarchies and sub-hierarchies to help people best search and discover
pockets of people they want to follow. Much as AOL, iVillage and the
other major portals did to help organize and target their massive
horizontal audiences. This easily helps new users get engaged and get
busy, as they can simply wade in and find relevant groups with a few
clicks. Further, groups are great targets for future advertising and
lead generation, as they’ve self-selected into particular areas of
interest.

You also need vertical applications. Investing.
Shopping - cars, music, etc. Travel. And on and on. With a sufficiently
robust API, the developer community can innovate in much the same way
as they have for the iPhone. Create a Twitter App Store? Maybe. But the
main goal should be providing the environment for developers to come up
with great stuff that will be used, that ultimtely people will be
willing to pay for.

Interestingly enough, many of my predictions have
come true. There has been an explosion of applications built on top of
Twitter, attempting to make sense of its vast and disaggregated
audience. To this day, if I go on the native Twitter site and use its
search functionality, I don’t get much out of the experience. I get
infinitely more value from the apps that have been built courtesy of
the Twitter API. The problem then as now relates to discovery: how do I find people who care about the stuff I care about, find people from my past just as I do on Facebook, build a universe of people whom I follow that creates real community as opposed to a series of disjointed entities? These are still questions that remain to be answered. At the end of the day people want connectedness and relatedness. Yes, news updates and worthwhile and I follow a handful of bots to keep me current, but my follow list is largely comprised of people whom I like and respect, people who create interesting content that stimulates my thinking and brings me new perspectives. But I’m sure there are many more people out there I’d like to be following that I simply can’t find, and vice versa. This is a mega problem that will invariably be solved, but it hasn’t been yet.

Stocktwits is merely one answer to the profound question that is discovery. In its domain, it is a category-killer product. But we need many more Stocktwits to drive value to vertical communities - and affiliates and advertisers - across the Twitter landscape.