Wednesday, January 30, 2013

StockTwits Hit By Twitter Rule Changes

San Diego-based StockTwits, the stock and finance focused micro-messaging service headed by Howard Lindzon, looks like it has a new challenge on its hands: how to deal with a rule change by Twitter which makes it so that users can no longer directly post to Twitter with a ticker symbol, and have that reflected in their StockTwits account. According to StockTwits, effective March 1st, users will no longer be able to just include a $TICKER symbol in their Twitter account and have that show up on StockTwits, like they did before. StockTwits said the move is "our choice" because the company said it does not feel it can follow Twitter's new rules in working with third party developers. StockTwits did say that over 75 percent of its message today come from StockTwits and/or other financial applications or web sites. Twitter rolled out rule changes to its API in August, which has affected a number of third party developers of applications using Twitter; those changes have been widely considered unfriendly to third party developers.

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