$GOOG, $YHOO, $AOL, and Stocktwits - Control vs Empowerment

One of the primary tenets of my theory called Revolutionomics is that those who empower, win; and that those who try to control, lose.

This theory applies to governments as people tend to fight oppressors, and it applies to businesses as well. And on the Internet, it applies to everything.

That is, people will always migrate towards any site that empowers them to easily access or distribute their information, content or other products. People will always migrate away from any site that tries to control what they can do with the information, content and other products that they're either consuming or delivering for consumption.

AOL failed in large part because they stuck with trying to keep their user base "locked in" to their old name@aol.com email addresses by requiring them to pay $20/month to keep it. Remember that model?!

Yahoo failed because they became a content ownership company and their incentive remains to drive their user base to their own proprietary web content like Yahoo Finance and the great Tech Ticker videos by my old friend, Aaron Task. Over time we've all figured out that Yahoo is sometimes trying to control our internet habits for their own profit.

Google was great at empowering their user base to find whatever content the user wanted from any source around the world. But then they bought YouTube and now they try to make sure you watch Google videos and/or YouTube whenever you search google for videos.

But with products like gmail, standard search, and trends.google.com, they're still more focused on empowering their user than anybody else on the Net.

Except maybe twitter. One of the reasons that twitter continues to succeed despite the limitations they put on their user base of 140 characters is they twitter will let anybody post just about anything from anywhere at anytime. They don't try to control what people disseminate or consume.

You can link to anything you want, you can market anything you want, you can write just about anything you want.

At some point, my buddy Howard Lindzon, who among other things founded, built and sold WallStrip.com to CBS and is as brilliant an entrepreneur as anybody you'll ever meet, told me about another one of what I think will be a successful company he's founded -- stocktwits.com.

I signed up for the site and have occasionally ventured over to it to check it out and have found it pretty darn useful and informative.

I think some of my tweets go up on stocktwits.com when I use what's called a "$ tag" in my twitter post. That is, for example, I put up a post a couple weeks ago when I turned from bullish to bearish on gold:

Getting lots of questions about my having turned bearish on Gold and looking for a gold crash. http://bit.ly/p1OQr $GLD $C $BAC $MER #tfree

People who want to read up on what the twitter community is saying about gold can then go into twitter.com and search for $GLD and my post will be included.

And since I signed up for stocktwits.com, I think that tweet go republished over there too.

Back to Revolutionomics and how it applies here -- On Thursday before I left, I posted the following:

Just published my latest newsletter at RevolutioNewsletter.com. Updates on $MOT $AAPL $T gold and more.

Stocktwits.com had a problem with me marketing my newsletter on their site. They don't want it to to turn into a bulletin board of links and scummy advertisements -- and that makes some sense. But what about empowering the user base to do whatever they want. Here's the back and forth I had with the representative of stocktwits:

Cody,

please dont advertise yr paid product on our site. that said great to hav u here hit me @ pXXX@stocktwits.com we get in cohoots so all happy

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Dear P,

not sure what you're talking about. If i'm on your site, and you don't want my posts going up there, you can remove me. I'm definitely going to continue marketing my paid products and other things on Twitter, which is where I posted that.

I've mentioned stocktwits.com positively many times on Happy Hour and elsewhere, and I'm a little confused that you sent me a note like this.

All the best,

Cody

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lov u cody!

but we do hav an etiquette that we must promote and find that it is more of a learning curve with most, including yourself, rather than intentional.

there is a simple solution.

when u have awesome or actionable market information, then use our $ tagging system and when you have a promotional tweet, then simply leave the $ tag off.

if you have any other problems, questions, comments or anything at all please feel free to hit me any time via email or call directly at XXX.

thanks,
p

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P,

I have people searching by $ tags on twitter's search function itself. When I refer to stocks, I usually add the $ tag...even when it's a promotional tag because I want people who search the $ tag to find whatever I've linked to -- even if it's my own product.

I have to tell you that I'd rather just remove myself from stocktwits.com entirely and use the $ tag so people can search by it. I imagine most of your users would feel the same.

From a business decision, I'm shocked that you guys wouldn't want me to use stocktwits as a platform to market my products anyway...I mean, why else am I on there but to network, market and learn.

Rock on,

Cody

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cody,

we cant have the marketing side because then what happens is that many people start marketing like crazy and it obscures the usefulness of the site. and while my sense is that you personally would not abuse, others do.

we hav worked incredibly hard to keep stocktwits pristine and this hard work shows by having a site that is useful to traders rather than simply marketers.

we find that most go along with the etiquette and adjust pretty quickly.

sorry that you feel this way.

p

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So does stocktwits.com own the right to "$ tag" my posts? Or do they simply want me to leave their site entirely, since I'm going to continue marketing on twitter and I want people on twitter to be able to find my posts on twitter by searching for whatever $ tag their interested in?

To confuse things a little more for those of you who haven't ever figured out this whole twitter and/or social network thing -- I personally founded a political anti-partisan social networking site called SpokeUp.com and, among many other features, we enable our users to post their wires straight to twitter.com. And twitter.com then posts that wire directly onto my facebook status page. And to stocktwits.com, as P reminded me above.

We rely on the other community members as much as anything to chide, prod, and push each other to use the site in a respectful, informative, and rational manner. We rail anytime anybody tries to make one of the evil mainstream political parties, either the Republicans or Democrats, as better or different than the other. Even though most of the public sees "left and right" where it's not, our community won't let that nonsense fly. It's not easy and we've lost some users, I'm sure because we, as a community and as a company, can be controlling too.

What do you guys think? Control vs. empowerment. Empowerment, especially where people can go somewhere else by simply typing in a new website into their browser, seems to me to be the ultimate arbiter of success in the 21st century.