Canadian Entrepreneur Accuses Twitter of Hijacking His Concept

By: Kuljit Grewal  |   July 31st, 2012   |   Business, News, O Canada, Social Media

Howard Lindzon, the founder of StockTwits, a service that organizes investment information from Twitter has got a major bone to pick with Twitter. The company, which deploys “cashtags” – hashtag style metadata tags that begin with the “$” symbol rather than the hash (#) to track and parlay its investment information has accused Twitter of “hijacking” their core feature.

 

According to Lindzon’s personal blog, he had developed and employed the “cashtag” feature over four years ago and even presented the idea to Twitter mere months ago. At that time, they expressed little interest in the concept, but that seems to have changed, much to the ire of StockTwits CEO.

 

In what can strongly be considered as utter thievery, Twitter announced the integration of “cashtags” into their service, offering ticker symbols (i.e. $GOOG for Google) that can be clicked for search results pertaining to that particular company.

 

Lindzon expresses his disappointment with the platform his company is based off of mainly in fear of it resulting in an inferior product. The result he feels would confuse users and is the best example of imitation representing the ultimate form of flattery.

 

StockTwits boasts various large firms such as CNN Money, Bloomberg, the Globe and Mail and MSN as customers, and have been working diligently to grow that list. It will be interesting to see if Twitter’s adoption of the tags kills Twits, or whether the company’s features all it to rise to the top.