Twitter as a productivity tool – a financial services example

Image by Frank Hamm via Flickr

A month or so ago I wrote about Twitter as a productivity tool for participants in the Hacking Education conference in New York – that was quite a loose example of how Twitter extended people’s reach into new conversations and extended the range of existing conversations, thereby making the communication process more efficient for all.

There is a report in the Telegraph today about hedge fund traders using technology from US company StreamBase to mine the Twitter stream for information that they can plug into their automated trading platforms. 

For me this is a pretty clear example of Twitter being used as a tool to increase the productivity (or more accurately effectiveness) of trading systems.