9 ms·

StockTwits founder “disappointed” that Twitter is “hijacking” his idea

54 points by TDL 14y ago

DigitalSea 14y ago
While I can sympathise to a certain extent, the ignorance of the StockTwits founder makes it hard to completely sympathise for honestly thinking that a company wouldn't take a money making idea using its platform and bake it in to the service. It's the same problem people complain of in the Apple app store, numerous times developers have cried foul over Apple stealing their idea for themselves. I definitely agree it's not ideal and will stifle innovation, but when you're as big as Twitter or Apple you can afford to lose a few developers using your platform without any recourse.
- notimetorelax 14y ago
  I think the difference with Apple is that developers are not piggy bagging on Apple's infrastructure, but provide new kinds of services that Apple hasn't thought of. Then when these services prove to be popular Apple implements similar feature and uses the notorious clause in their contract prohibiting replication of native functionality. This approach is much more dirty.
bherms 14y ago
Once again I say "don't bet the farm on the generosity of someone else." People frequently cry when these services pull support, "steal" ideas (I use steal loosely), or block access... Would you build your kids playhouse on your neighbors yard just because he doesn't say no?
samstave 14y ago
Isn't this a case study in the question a VC would ask; "What would stop [BigCo|CompetitorX|Facebook|Google] etc from doing [your service]...
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Isn't this common sense? Or anyone who's had a freshmen intro to business class? Barriers to entry?
  - samstave 14y ago
    Yes it is - I think this is the key factor in defining "is this a feature or a business"
- smacktoward 14y ago
  You would think so, but apparently not, since (if CrunchBase is accurate) StockTwits has raised $8.6 million in venture funding over four rounds: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/stocktwits http://www.crunchbase.com/company/stocktwits So either the VCs didn't ask the question, or they did ask it but didn't think too hard about the answer they got.
- capkutay 14y ago
  Some VC's are excellent because they ask the right questions. Once they join they are a member of your team and will go out of their way to make it a successful venture... Sometimes the VC's are tools. They will fight to own the biggest stake possible. Once they join, they just sit on the board while they twiddle their thumbs and wish they were playing golf instead.
bertomartin 14y ago
Didn't he "borrow" the whole twitter idea and apply it to stocks specifically?
HaloZero 14y ago
Not sure why he's angry, didn't this same thing happen with Instapaper and Apple? If anything, it will expose the idea to countless others and if they really like it they might want to go beyond Twitter's implementation of it, unless the feature is so weak / easy to do that you shouldn't be relying on it.
mmanfrin 14y ago
Pedantry: he used 'i.e.' wrong. I.e. is used when specifying, not giving an example. He should have used 'e.g.'.
- _delirium 14y ago
  That's not the worst thing about the post if we're going to be pedantic about grammar. :) For example, he said "does mean" where he presumably intended to say the opposite, "doesn't mean". Also, "Lot's of pressures" shouldn't have the apostrophe.
jazzychad 14y ago
Interestingly, I was the one who lobbied Twitter (more specifically Matt Sanford of the search team) to make '$' a valid stop character for searching on summize/twitter search. You've been able to search $TICKER for 2-3 years now. The only thing Twitter has done now is linkified them like hashtags, and they only link to a twitter search of that ticker... so nothing really interesting yet. I've also linked $TICKER from TweetGrid for as long, except my links go straight to StockTwits: e.g. http://tweetgrid.com/grid?l=0&q1=%24AAPL http://tweetgrid.com/grid?l=0&q1=%24AAPL
- lusr 14y ago
  My problem was Twitter's API not having a more intelligent filter API. If you want to use it to filter all tweets with stocks (i.e. "\$\w{1,4}") you can't as far as I could tell. Instead you have to filter on '$' which gets you a ton of noise ("got me some $$$ for 2NITE! yeah!!!!").
  - dtsingletary 14y ago
    ... Which you could them pull into a database and filter with your Regex after the API. What does the noise cost you? It's a solvable problem. true, the expanded results may keep you from getting relevant tweets due to rate limiting.
    - yo-mf 14y ago
      But that is the point, you get rate limited. Of course you can take the data set and clean it in your own database. The problem is how much relevant data you can get before getting cut off.
  - wslh 14y ago
    Twitter has an incredible primitive search. A search for C++ searches for C instead of recognizing the whole term.
kyro 14y ago
If your entire business is based on searching another company's already searchable set of data by using the apparently ingenious method of prepending a "$" to search terms, and you've raised $8.6 million knowing full well that at any time said company who owns this data could implement such a trivial feature, then you're taking a stupidly ridiculous risk. You can turn your feature/plugin into a company, but more than most startups, you should be incredibly wary of the prospects of those you're piggy-backing to duplicate your product. I had similar criticisms for Rapportive – Google could've "hijacked" their idea at any time. They made it out nicely, but the odds were really, really slim, and still are for anyone wanting to do the same. I'm not saying don't go for it; just don't be surprised if and when your idea is copied.
- fsniper 14y ago
  That's the problem with most of API apps of twitter. Twitter is a simple system. And if your are implementing a feature over Twitter via their api you are very vulnerable to this. Anytime twitter could implement this feature. Because you most probably have a user base of "small subset of Twitter's", you will have a great problem after all the users have access to this feature. This will make you the second competitor for the feature and move Twitter to leadership for it. So building features over somebody else's API is a bad move. You have to build a business which is not solely based over a nifty feature you have implemented over somebody's API which could be hijacked in no time. Implementing features are easy, building businesses are hard and time consuming.
- nandemo 14y ago
  Nitpick: when you're raising $8.6M you're not taking a ridiculous risk, your investors are. Arguably you then have less risk, e.g. you can reliably draw a salary for several years even if your company isn't yet profitable.
  - mibbitier 14y ago
    Is this true? Will investors happily let founders draw comfortable salaries for several years? That doesn't sound right to me...
skadamat 14y ago
He's just mad that Twitter didn't acquire his company
andr 14y ago
If your business can be killed by another company changing a regex, was it a business in the first place?
- kristofferR 14y ago
  Real enough to raise several millions multiple times, hire a medium sized team (22 according to CrunchBase), and be featured in multiple prestigious publications like TIME, Bloomberg TV and Fast Company at least. And to be fair - this "cashtag" isn't the product StockTwits, it's just a feature of it (albeit an important one).
  - dinkumthinkum 14y ago
    That doesn't mean it's a real business at all. It could be a sign of over hype, over valuation, and just foolishness. I mean, the proof is in the pudding here. I guess there was very little risk management done here. Joel Spolsky wrote about not making this mistake awhile back, though I have "google block" and can't seeM to find it (maybe it was on a podcast).
  - joeblau 14y ago
    Well if they "raised money" then when Investors asked them the question along the lines of "Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?" StockTwits should have clearly seen this coming. I wrote a similar app called TwitSkills which used Twitter to post and search job skills and even I knew that Twitter could steal my idea in the blink of an eye.
sturmeh 14y ago
Neither of them support the ASX, shame.
stevewilhelm 14y ago
Reuters and Bloomberg have been using stock (bond and currency) tickers as links for decades in their trading systems.
nivla 14y ago
An entire business built on a "nifty" trick that is easily replicable and is of value. Well, sooner or later it was going to copied. Also, not sure how good the context of '$' is >Go check out $HIT or $WAG (walgreen’s) on Twitter search or thousands I first read that as Shit or Swag :|
- benjaminfox 14y ago
  > I first read that as Shit or Swag :| That highlights the point he's making :) Searching StockTwits for '$WAG' results in relevant tweets about Walgreen Co. [1], whereas searching Twitter for '$WAG' results in tweets containing '$wag' in place of 'swag' [2]. [1] StockTwits '$WAG': http://stocktwits.com/symbol/WAG?q=%24wag http://stocktwits.com/symbol/WAG?q=%24wag [2] Twitter '$WAG': http://twitter.com/#!/search/%24wag/ http://twitter.com/#!/search/%24wag/
  - endianswap 14y ago
    Then what is he complaining about? It looks like his "product" has just as much opportunity as it did before, just the $links are now a different color by default, no?
gadders 14y ago
I think Joel said it best in 2009: "Filling little gaps in another company’s product lineup is snatching nickels from the path of an oncoming steam roller." He also has a good Dave Winer quote: Dave Winer (in 2007): "Sometimes developers choose a niche that’s either directly in the path of the vendor, or even worse, on the roadmap of the vendor. In those cases, they don’t really deserve our sympathy." http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/06/10c.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/06/10c.html
inthewoods 14y ago
Lots of critique on the post itself (most of which I agree with), but as others have mentioned, Stocktwits has a real business - they sell compliance-friendly social network tools to public companies - apparently about 150 of them for $1500/month. That's about $2.7m in revenue if those numbers are correct. They also have PRO accounts for $500/month - no idea the number of accounts. Obviously the numbers could be bullshit, but I've seen a fair number of Fortune 500 companies (Shell Oil, etc) using their service. It's been a while since I looked at their site/tools, but I thought built their own Twitter that runs alongside Twitter, although I'd be curious what percentage of posts end up on Stocktwits network vs. Twitter. If that is still the case, clearly they were concerned about being overly dependent on Twitter. My point is just that the $ isn't the business - and honestly, I don't see why this does anything but make their lives actually easier. That's my main complaint - what does this change for Howard? Maybe it makes it easier for a competitor to build something similar, but what was really stopping them in any case? Couldn't a competitor have just adopted the same methodology? No connection to the company - just thought the info might be useful.
- jcuervo 14y ago
  Howard does sound like he is complaining, not sure why. I had heard him talk at event where he did say they built their own platform independent of Twitter.
halis 14y ago
This is just a case of a bad business person failing to protect themselves. If the idea is that revolutionary and important to your business, then get several patents on the idea and then be ready to defend those patents against everyone. This is why I'm not a fan of API's to begin with. It's just a proving ground for the company hosting the API to troll the best ideas.
countessa 14y ago
Lots of derision over how easy it was for StockTwits to build this and as such they don't deserve sympathy? I don't get it. It sucks for them that Twitter is implementing this feature, but I have to say that I have respect for StockTwits - they noticed a gap in a market, produced a product and got on with building their business. That's what we should all be doing. I think the real/productive questions here are "what can StockTwits do to leverage their current user base so that they continue to provide a valuable product and keep building?" or "what is the best pivot they could do to keep building their business?"
AznHisoka 14y ago
I have no sympathy. Why didn't he complain when other companies died when Twitter/FB/Craigslist took away their business model? It's not about Twitter killing the little guy, or stealing a feature from a startup. It's about you making less money. Cry me a river.
jcuervo 14y ago
A write up comparing the two http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/07/stacking-twitters-new-cashtags-vs-stocktwits/55228/ http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/07/stacking-t...

54 points by TDL 14y ago

While I can sympathise to a certain extent, the ignorance of the StockTwits founder makes it hard to completely sympathise for honestly thinking that a company wouldn't take a money making idea using its platform and bake it in to the service. It's the same problem people complain of in the Apple app store, numerous times developers have cried foul over Apple stealing their idea for themselves. I definitely agree it's not ideal and will stifle innovation, but when you're as big as Twitter or Apple you can afford to lose a few developers using your platform without any recourse.

notimetorelax 14y ago
I think the difference with Apple is that developers are not piggy bagging on Apple's infrastructure, but provide new kinds of services that Apple hasn't thought of. Then when these services prove to be popular Apple implements similar feature and uses the notorious clause in their contract prohibiting replication of native functionality. This approach is much more dirty.

bherms 14y ago

Once again I say "don't bet the farm on the generosity of someone else." People frequently cry when these services pull support, "steal" ideas (I use steal loosely), or block access... Would you build your kids playhouse on your neighbors yard just because he doesn't say no?

samstave 14y ago

Isn't this a case study in the question a VC would ask; "What would stop [BigCo|CompetitorX|Facebook|Google] etc from doing [your service]...

drivebyacct2 14y ago
Isn't this common sense? Or anyone who's had a freshmen intro to business class? Barriers to entry?
- samstave 14y ago
  Yes it is - I think this is the key factor in defining "is this a feature or a business"
smacktoward 14y ago
You would think so, but apparently not, since (if CrunchBase is accurate) StockTwits has raised $8.6 million in venture funding over four rounds: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/stocktwits http://www.crunchbase.com/company/stocktwits So either the VCs didn't ask the question, or they did ask it but didn't think too hard about the answer they got.
capkutay 14y ago
Some VC's are excellent because they ask the right questions. Once they join they are a member of your team and will go out of their way to make it a successful venture... Sometimes the VC's are tools. They will fight to own the biggest stake possible. Once they join, they just sit on the board while they twiddle their thumbs and wish they were playing golf instead.

bertomartin 14y ago

Didn't he "borrow" the whole twitter idea and apply it to stocks specifically?

HaloZero 14y ago

Not sure why he's angry, didn't this same thing happen with Instapaper and Apple? If anything, it will expose the idea to countless others and if they really like it they might want to go beyond Twitter's implementation of it, unless the feature is so weak / easy to do that you shouldn't be relying on it.

mmanfrin 14y ago

Pedantry: he used 'i.e.' wrong. I.e. is used when specifying, not giving an example. He should have used 'e.g.'.

_delirium 14y ago
That's not the worst thing about the post if we're going to be pedantic about grammar. :) For example, he said "does mean" where he presumably intended to say the opposite, "doesn't mean". Also, "Lot's of pressures" shouldn't have the apostrophe.

jazzychad 14y ago

Interestingly, I was the one who lobbied Twitter (more specifically Matt Sanford of the search team) to make '$' a valid stop character for searching on summize/twitter search. You've been able to search $TICKER for 2-3 years now. The only thing Twitter has done now is linkified them like hashtags, and they only link to a twitter search of that ticker... so nothing really interesting yet. I've also linked $TICKER from TweetGrid for as long, except my links go straight to StockTwits: e.g. http://tweetgrid.com/grid?l=0&q1=%24AAPL http://tweetgrid.com/grid?l=0&q1=%24AAPL

lusr 14y ago
My problem was Twitter's API not having a more intelligent filter API. If you want to use it to filter all tweets with stocks (i.e. "\$\w{1,4}") you can't as far as I could tell. Instead you have to filter on '$' which gets you a ton of noise ("got me some $$$ for 2NITE! yeah!!!!").
- dtsingletary 14y ago
  ... Which you could them pull into a database and filter with your Regex after the API. What does the noise cost you? It's a solvable problem. true, the expanded results may keep you from getting relevant tweets due to rate limiting.
  - yo-mf 14y ago
    But that is the point, you get rate limited. Of course you can take the data set and clean it in your own database. The problem is how much relevant data you can get before getting cut off.
- wslh 14y ago
  Twitter has an incredible primitive search. A search for C++ searches for C instead of recognizing the whole term.

kyro 14y ago

If your entire business is based on searching another company's already searchable set of data by using the apparently ingenious method of prepending a "$" to search terms, and you've raised $8.6 million knowing full well that at any time said company who owns this data could implement such a trivial feature, then you're taking a stupidly ridiculous risk. You can turn your feature/plugin into a company, but more than most startups, you should be incredibly wary of the prospects of those you're piggy-backing to duplicate your product. I had similar criticisms for Rapportive – Google could've "hijacked" their idea at any time. They made it out nicely, but the odds were really, really slim, and still are for anyone wanting to do the same. I'm not saying don't go for it; just don't be surprised if and when your idea is copied.

fsniper 14y ago
That's the problem with most of API apps of twitter. Twitter is a simple system. And if your are implementing a feature over Twitter via their api you are very vulnerable to this. Anytime twitter could implement this feature. Because you most probably have a user base of "small subset of Twitter's", you will have a great problem after all the users have access to this feature. This will make you the second competitor for the feature and move Twitter to leadership for it. So building features over somebody else's API is a bad move. You have to build a business which is not solely based over a nifty feature you have implemented over somebody's API which could be hijacked in no time. Implementing features are easy, building businesses are hard and time consuming.
nandemo 14y ago
Nitpick: when you're raising $8.6M you're not taking a ridiculous risk, your investors are. Arguably you then have less risk, e.g. you can reliably draw a salary for several years even if your company isn't yet profitable.
- mibbitier 14y ago
  Is this true? Will investors happily let founders draw comfortable salaries for several years? That doesn't sound right to me...

skadamat 14y ago

He's just mad that Twitter didn't acquire his company

andr 14y ago

If your business can be killed by another company changing a regex, was it a business in the first place?

kristofferR 14y ago
Real enough to raise several millions multiple times, hire a medium sized team (22 according to CrunchBase), and be featured in multiple prestigious publications like TIME, Bloomberg TV and Fast Company at least. And to be fair - this "cashtag" isn't the product StockTwits, it's just a feature of it (albeit an important one).
- dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  That doesn't mean it's a real business at all. It could be a sign of over hype, over valuation, and just foolishness. I mean, the proof is in the pudding here. I guess there was very little risk management done here. Joel Spolsky wrote about not making this mistake awhile back, though I have "google block" and can't seeM to find it (maybe it was on a podcast).
- joeblau 14y ago
  Well if they "raised money" then when Investors asked them the question along the lines of "Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?" StockTwits should have clearly seen this coming. I wrote a similar app called TwitSkills which used Twitter to post and search job skills and even I knew that Twitter could steal my idea in the blink of an eye.

sturmeh 14y ago

Neither of them support the ASX, shame.

stevewilhelm 14y ago

Reuters and Bloomberg have been using stock (bond and currency) tickers as links for decades in their trading systems.

nivla 14y ago

An entire business built on a "nifty" trick that is easily replicable and is of value. Well, sooner or later it was going to copied. Also, not sure how good the context of '$' is >Go check out $HIT or $WAG (walgreen’s) on Twitter search or thousands I first read that as Shit or Swag :|

benjaminfox 14y ago
> I first read that as Shit or Swag :| That highlights the point he's making :) Searching StockTwits for '$WAG' results in relevant tweets about Walgreen Co. [1], whereas searching Twitter for '$WAG' results in tweets containing '$wag' in place of 'swag' [2]. [1] StockTwits '$WAG': http://stocktwits.com/symbol/WAG?q=%24wag http://stocktwits.com/symbol/WAG?q=%24wag [2] Twitter '$WAG': http://twitter.com/#!/search/%24wag/ http://twitter.com/#!/search/%24wag/
- endianswap 14y ago
  Then what is he complaining about? It looks like his "product" has just as much opportunity as it did before, just the $links are now a different color by default, no?

gadders 14y ago

I think Joel said it best in 2009: "Filling little gaps in another company’s product lineup is snatching nickels from the path of an oncoming steam roller." He also has a good Dave Winer quote: Dave Winer (in 2007): "Sometimes developers choose a niche that’s either directly in the path of the vendor, or even worse, on the roadmap of the vendor. In those cases, they don’t really deserve our sympathy." http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/06/10c.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/06/10c.html

inthewoods 14y ago

Lots of critique on the post itself (most of which I agree with), but as others have mentioned, Stocktwits has a real business - they sell compliance-friendly social network tools to public companies - apparently about 150 of them for $1500/month. That's about $2.7m in revenue if those numbers are correct. They also have PRO accounts for $500/month - no idea the number of accounts. Obviously the numbers could be bullshit, but I've seen a fair number of Fortune 500 companies (Shell Oil, etc) using their service. It's been a while since I looked at their site/tools, but I thought built their own Twitter that runs alongside Twitter, although I'd be curious what percentage of posts end up on Stocktwits network vs. Twitter. If that is still the case, clearly they were concerned about being overly dependent on Twitter. My point is just that the $ isn't the business - and honestly, I don't see why this does anything but make their lives actually easier. That's my main complaint - what does this change for Howard? Maybe it makes it easier for a competitor to build something similar, but what was really stopping them in any case? Couldn't a competitor have just adopted the same methodology? No connection to the company - just thought the info might be useful.

jcuervo 14y ago
Howard does sound like he is complaining, not sure why. I had heard him talk at event where he did say they built their own platform independent of Twitter.

halis 14y ago

This is just a case of a bad business person failing to protect themselves. If the idea is that revolutionary and important to your business, then get several patents on the idea and then be ready to defend those patents against everyone. This is why I'm not a fan of API's to begin with. It's just a proving ground for the company hosting the API to troll the best ideas.

countessa 14y ago

Lots of derision over how easy it was for StockTwits to build this and as such they don't deserve sympathy? I don't get it. It sucks for them that Twitter is implementing this feature, but I have to say that I have respect for StockTwits - they noticed a gap in a market, produced a product and got on with building their business. That's what we should all be doing. I think the real/productive questions here are "what can StockTwits do to leverage their current user base so that they continue to provide a valuable product and keep building?" or "what is the best pivot they could do to keep building their business?"

AznHisoka 14y ago

I have no sympathy. Why didn't he complain when other companies died when Twitter/FB/Craigslist took away their business model? It's not about Twitter killing the little guy, or stealing a feature from a startup. It's about you making less money. Cry me a river.

jcuervo 14y ago

A write up comparing the two http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/07/stacking-twitters-new-cashtags-vs-stocktwits/55228/ http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/07/stacking-t...