Twitter: Platform To Start Successful Ventures?

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures just wrote a post on his blog indicating that StockTwits, an aggregator of tweets about publicly traded companies, just received funding, most notably from respected investors and entrepreneurs Howard Lindzon (creator of WallStrip) and Roger Ehrenberg, a finance-type turned investor (WallStrip, BlogTalkRadio, Covestor, TheLadders, Clickable, Silicon Alley Insider) and blogger.

Despite the fact that these respected backers are convinced that StockTwits is a worthy investment, I am skeptical. I'm not yet convinced that Twitter is a platform upon which a company can successfully launch. Creating a service for Twitter that enhances a power-tweeter's user experience (like Summize, which was ultimately acquired by Twitter) makes sense as a commercially viable business. But stand-alone companies that simply make a few minor modifications to the Twitter experience, I believe are doomed.

I poked around in StockTwits today and made a few observations. For starters, the content being published through Twitter, to say the least, was very lackluster. In addition, I can just as easily use Twitter's search service (formally Summize) to return tweets that mention ticker symbols on demand or I can subscribe to an RSS feed of tweets that reference the ticker symbols in which I am most interested. Even more, I doubt that StockTwits will become a method for quick communication between traders because almost every trader I know uses traditional instant messaging for that.

That being said, I see the motivation. Short snippets of useful (read: not "Hey check out $MSFT!") financial information ticking through the feed of a passive recipient is an attractive service. Investors and banks spend thousands, if not millions, of dollars on tools to aggregate and present financial news and information in compelling, authoritative and useful ways. SkyGrid, a DFJ-backed startup taking a Valley approach to aggregating and analyzing news on publicly traded companies, charges $500/month/user for their services. It begs the question: what is the StockTwits business model? Financial information is a multi-billion dollar market. If their service is actually useful, why aren't they charging for it?

StockTwits, Seesmic, Twhirl -- what is their fate? Mark Zuckerberg claims that investors have plugged a total of $200 million into ventures launching on the Facebook platform. If you are shocked by that figure -- well, good. But why feel different about Twitter?

I look forward to hearing your comments below.