Got sent a few intriguing links today. The first touches upon a concept of data mining the "social web", a topic I wrote about a few weeks back in my post "The Industrial Revolution of Data". A new site called StockTwits is described as an open, community-powered idea and information service for investments. Users can eavesdrop on traders and investors, or contribute to the conversation and build their reputation as savvy market wizards. The service takes financial related data - using Twitter as the content production platform - and structures it by stock, user, reputation, etc.
StockTwits is a prime example of the concept I call "social knowledge discovery". These services will give the ability for anyone to spot trends, breaking news as well as threats (economic, physical or otherwise) in real time or even preemptively. Think of it as a social cloud mining platform.
Also launched today is a service called StatTweets which uses twitter as an notification mechanism. The service allows users to get news, live game scores, standings, rankings, point spread updates, and other stats for your favorite basketball or football team all from Twitter.
Are you interested in creating your very own social knowledge discovery service? Now you can thanks to a new open source project by the Apache foundation called Apache ESME or Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment. ESME is described as a secure and highly scalable microsharing and micromessaging platform that allows people to discover and meet one another and get controlled access to other sources of information, all in a business process context.
Some of ESME's present features include an Adobe Air client, Web client, Extensive set of built-in actions, Login via Open-ID. Planned Features include; Federation scenarios, Groups, ERP notifications, Prioritization, Show local time for users. Most of these planned feature don't currently exist in twitter. So it will be interested to see if twitter follows suit.
