Stocktwits uses Twitter to build a niche community around trading stocks. Scoble interviews founder Howard Lindzon. Here’s how it works. Post on Twitter about trading stocks and preface stock symbols with ‘$’ and use ‘stocktwits’ as a hashtag. An example tweet might be “I think $MSFT is a long-term buy because of Windows 7 and Bing. #stocktwits”
Stocktwits site reads the Twitter stream for such content, filters out spam and extraneous chatter and presents the resultant real time, relevant intelligent tweets about stocks on their website. It’s all high quality, and easily searchable too.
Any niche or subgroup can use technology like this to communicate with its participants. It doesn’t just have to be stocks, it could be political, artistic, local communities, whatever. This is yet another fascinating way Twitter is being used.