It was only a few months ago that StockTwits, a real time platform for stock traders to share information, broke away from Twitter and forged ahead on its own. Part of that separation was the creation of a desktop AIR application that created an entire investor ecosystem, including video, news and charts. Now those features are appearing on the StockTwits site itself, at beta.stocktwits.com. For now the company will run the old and new sites side by side and give users a period of time to get comfortable with the beta site.

Co-founder Howard Lindzon suggests five things that new StockTwits users will want to do on the new site: watch the suggested user stream, peruse charts shared by other users, check out specific filtered ticker pages (example), watch the 24-hour StockTwits TV stream, or contribute your own content.

Last month StockTwits acquired a financial news site and continues to bring in authoritative voices to share their trading strategies via blog posts and video.

StockTwits is like cocaine for hard core traders, They started long ago with just a filtered stream of Twitter messages that touched on stocks. But they’ve continued to add resources that traders want and need to their product suite. I won’t be surprised if more than a few of the big financial guys make a run for them this year. There’s so much concentrated activity flowing through StockTwits that any number of suitors will be eager to take control of this community.

Crunchbase

• STOCKTWITS

Company: StockTwits

Website: stocktwits.com

Launch Date: 2008

Funding: $8.6M

StockTwits is a social, stock micro-blogging service. StockTwits is an open, community-powered idea and information service for investments. Users can eavesdrop on traders and investors, or contribute to the conversation and build their reputation as savvy market wizards. The service takes financial related data and structures it by stock, user, reputation, etc. Log into the site with your Twitter details or download the StockTwits Desktop and you will be joining a community where market participants share their very best ideas in...

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