Twitter and the Stock Market

It may be a funny thing to say but there are ( or could be ) similarities between Twitter and the Stock Market. Why so I say this, well, it is a fact that computer systems are used to track the fortunes of shares (are they going up and down?) and that in many cases, decisions to buy or sell these shares will either be made by a computer (or at least suggested by one). The price of shares will therefore be to some degree or another decided by computers. Now if these computers make their decisions based on the market place and this to a degree is effected by other computers you could imagine that shares could go up and down like mad things, all with little intervention from humans, a few of whom may have unwittingly 'started the rollercoaster' by the purchase or sale of a critical amount of stock.

Now I'm sure that there are safeguards about this in the Financial Sector (well OK I hope that there are) but what about Twitter...

With the automated software you can get today, you can easily 'tell it' to go and follow hundreds of accounts and they, if they are using similar software will no doubt follow you back (even if only for a short while). The outcome of all this automation will no doubt be more followers (I can prove that) but are they 'real' people or is just a computer reading the tweets?

As you can see, computers are used in both areas in big ways, let's just hope that Twitter does not suffer in the same way as the Financial sector just has..