24/7 Wall St.

Correction: In error, 24/7 Wall St. sighted Walter Mossberg as the author of the Twitter piece. The article, “Birds of a Feather Twitter Together,” was authored by Katherine Boehret. Our apologies to Ms. Boehret for the oversight. Thanks to Mr. Mossberg for bringing this to our attention.

Yesterday, 24/7 Wall St. announced that it would begin using Twitter to pool all of its news content into one place and encouraged our readers to check it out.  At almost the exact same moment, like a sign from the heavens, Katherine Boehret from All Things Digital’s Mossberg Solution announced that Twitter was a new service that needed to be looked at. Ms. Boehret noted that   "Twitter does a good job of giving people simplified news about others and the world around them. If you’re often in a rush, Twitter can be a great resource for fast information."  She went on to say its easy to use, its real-time, and it makes online news simpler when you’re on the go.  The following is yesterday’s announcement and excerpts from Boehret’s piece.

24/7 Wall St.’s Twitter Announcement

As many of our readers know, 24/7 Wall St. writes copy for a number of sites including our own sites and those of our partners.   Our own sites include 24/7 Wall St., Voume Spike Investor, and BioHealthInvestor.  Some of our partner sites include AOL Money & Finance, Marketwatch, MSN, Stockhouse, BloggingStocks, and Huffington Post.

As a result of the somewhat fractured nature of our editorial process, we frequently don’t have the opportunity to share all of our stories with the regular readers of 24/7 Wall St.  We aim to change that.

24/7 Wall St. is going to try something new.  We have created a Twitter page.  In the site’s own words, Twitter is a way to "communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent, answers to one simple question: What are you doing?" Using Twitter, we will be able to let our readers in on what we are working on as well as what we’ve just finished.

In short, Twitter will enable us to accomplish three four simple goals:

1) aggregate stories that might not make it onto 24/7 Wall St.’s homepage
2) highlight stories on 24/7 Wall St. or other sites that we think are noteworthy
3) engage in some old-fashioned rumormongering
4) encourage a real-time exchange with our readers and find out what they think about the markets

If you’re interested in any of these, follow us at twitter.com/247wallst.com and look for our new "Twitter Updates" feature on the right side of the page.

Excerpts from Boehret’s piece on why Twitter needs to be looked at seriously.

What is it? In short, Twitter is a free social-networking tool that keeps people connected with one another and with sources of information. Twitter users submit updates about whatever they’re currently doing, and these updates cannot exceed 140 text-based characters.

Lingo: Twitter is the name of the service. The term twittering describes the activity of updating a Twitter account. A tweet is an individual Twitter update. Twitterers are people who use the service.

Followers, not Friends: Social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace use the term "friend" to refer to people who are connected with one another, but Twitterers can simply follow one another’s messages by finding a person’s username and selecting a "Follow" option. This alerts the person that you’re following them, and they can reciprocally choose to follow you, or not.

Why use it? While some people primarily use Twitter to post updates about their activities or comments on the news, I use the service more as a follower, allowing me to see quick snippets of news as it occurs. Most tweets are written by real people, while others, such as updates from news organizations that you’ve selected, are automatically generated. Many tweets include the addresses of Web sites with relevant articles that tell readers more on a topic.

Where is it? Twitter works on your Web browser at Twitter.com, where user updates appear in a simple list form as they are submitted. After you’ve signed up and started following other people, those people’s updates, or tweets, will appear when you log onto Twitter.com using a username and password.

Twitter also works on mobile phones, where the 140-character limit allows messages to be sent and received via SMS text messaging. Tweets can also be sent and received via email. Users with smartphones like BlackBerrys or iPhones can use one of the many popular mobile applications for accessing Twitter, which offer much richer options than simple SMS does; I’ll get into these later.

Privacy: Unlike other social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter isn’t focused on holding and sharing personal information about its members. Indeed, the service operates with a majority (80%, according to the company) of users opting to keep their updates public, that is, follow-able by anyone, without permission. This openness encourages people to follow one another or to see who others are already following, and then follow the same people.

Hope to see you on Twitter.

Sincerely,
24/7 Wall St.