

Twitter stock has been on a wild ride since Musk bought a 9% stake in the firm in April, announced a bid to acquire the firm at a massive premium weeks later and then decided he was “terminating” the deal in July over uncertainty about the prevalence of bots on the platform. He claims he was fired after refusing Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal’s instruction to present “false and misleading” documents to the company’s board, but a Twitter spokesperson attributed the dismissal to performance issues.

Zatko also stated Twitter prioritized user growth over reducing bots, as executives received bonuses of up to $10 million tied to user-count increases but nothing for reducing fake accounts. Photo credit: Jorg Hackemann/ Shutterstock.In the complaint published Tuesday, Zatko alleged that Twitter misled investors, users and the federal government by falsely claiming it had a security structure in place even though half of its servers were running out of date. Still, if Twitter makes popular the idea behind StockTwits, one has to wonder what will become of the small startup. His company will keep on trucking, building new features for its stock-tracking community members. Is the company being the bad guy again? Perhaps, but one could make the argument that ticker symbols as hashtags is a natural addition for a platform where people use hashtags to focus conversations around specific topics. Twitter has earned a reputation of being developer-unfriendly of late, shutting down, purchasing, or hobbling applications that compete with its core product. Get the latest Twitter Inc (TWTR) real-time quote, historical performance, charts, and other financial information to help you make more informed trading. Of course, this could, and probably will, change. The information network declined to respond to Lindzon’s remarks. Currently, the cashtags take users to a Twitter search of the ticker symbol but don't yet show any expanded information within the Twitter service. In a dirty way, it’s the ultimate compliment,” he said. “I am disappointed of course … but Stocktwits moved beyond that basic functionality four years ago. Lindzon said Twitter will confuse mainstream users with the clickable ticker symbols. “It only took four years to ‘ fill‘ this hole, though a few months back they told me in a detailed email it was not a hole they wanted to fill.” “It’s interesting that Twitter has hijacked our creation of $TICKER,” Lindzon said in blog post. StockTwits CEO and founder Howard Lindzon is none too happy about Twitter encroaching on his company’s territory. Messages posted from StockTwits reach more than 40 million unique users each month across StockTwits, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and content distribution partners, the company said in March. It’s also cemented syndication deals with publications to display StockTwits messages alongside stock quotes.

The company has created tools for investor relations professionals and marketers. The app, which still hinges on cashtags, has since evolved into a full-fledged social network for investors. StockTwits is a four-year-old, venture-backed startup that began its life as a little Twitter app for investors to exchange and follow stock-specific tweets through ticker symbol hashtags, or “cashtags” as the company calls them. The point is to allow for more focused financially-driven conversations and searches with a filtered view of tweets. The links function like hashtags, meaning that users can click them to view all the other tweets that include the same ticker symbol. The functionality was previously made available on Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Mac. “Now you can click on ticker symbols like $GE on to see search results about stocks and companies,” Twitter said in a update.Įssentially, Twitter recognizes the dollar sign, followed by one to six letters, as a clickable entity on the web. The 116-character message wasn’t received well by StockTwits, which makes a social network for investors that centers around these symbols. Monday, Twitter announced via tweet that it had converted ticker symbols, the symbols used to identify publicly traded companies, into clickable hashtags on the web.
