Cashtag: Twitter’s newest feature is a clickable stock symbol
Using Twitter as their battlefield, US military officials assigned to the International Security Assistance Force and members of the Taliban are waging a war of words.
Last night, Twitter quietly introduced a new feature, the cashtag.
According to Twitter (via its own Twitter account), users can now click on Stock or ticker symbols in any tweet to view search results for those stocks and companies.
The new feature, obviously the baby brother of the older, wiser hashtag, works the same way. Instead of the ubiquitous "#," the cashtag is identifiable by a "$." If you click a cashtag, Twitter will aggregate all the tweets that use the ticker under one label.
TechCrunch points out that this isn't the worst idea.
Unstructured data leads to a poor user experience, and Twitter has unstructured data in spades. To begin offering a search mechanism that is actually useful, the company may begin employing other symbols to use as secondary hashtags.
Cool, right? Word of caution, though. Gizmodo writes that thought this is cool, you probably shouldn't go asking the Twitterverse for monetary advice.
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