A Twitter Stock Quote Bot

Twitter bots are a lot like IM bots. You send them a message and they send you one back. Except, of course, you can do that through twitter on any "device" (Facebook, SMS, web, third party client, etc) you want.

My favorite twitter bot so far is the mytrade stock quote bot that launched late last week.

Here’s how do do it (you need to be a registered twitter user to do this):

First, go to mytrade’s twitter page and follow them.

Then, wait a minute or two for mytrade to follow you back (no need to do anything for that to happen)

Then, send a message via your phone or any other twitter client device that says:

d mytrade AAPL

and get an Apple stock quote back.  Of course you can replace AAPL with anything else you’d like.  And you can separate ticker symbols with a space to get a bunch of quotes, like this

d mytrade AAPL GOOG AMZN

to pick three tech companies I am long right now

I hope you like it as much as I do.

#stocks#VC & Technology

Comments (Archived):

  1. Jack Dorsey

    Awesome. Featured!

  2. Steve Poland

    I still hate the syntax — Andrew Parker and I chatted yesterday about this and I think we came up with a good way of making bots easier: http://stevepoland.com/twit…

  3. Jamie

    That looks awesome, I am waiting for them to follow me. I hp[e it can track London stock prices.

  4. rob

    Did the Twitter guys build this wheel on their own or are they reusing the extensive SMS query capabilities of Google??http://www.google.com/intl/…

    1. fredwilson

      This was built by mytrade.comFred

  5. andyswan

    Also, you can get automatic quotes on your favorite stocks 3x/day by “Watching” them….. just send: d mytrade watch AAPL GOOG AMZN …. and those stocks will be added to your “watchlist” so that you get morning, midday and closing quotes sent via twitter automatically. Thanks for the nice writeup Fred!

  6. howardlindzon

    andy – we sold too early 🙂

    1. fredwilson

      Hey, that’s what I said last week!

      1. andyswan

        Confucius say he who pass on entry shall not speak ill of exit

        1. fredwilson

          confucius also say he who says no before you are launched may say yes after you launch and get some users

          1. andyswan

            Ugh I hate being out-confuciused.

  7. howardlindzon

    yes I know. It was mean 🙂 .

    1. fredwilson

      arrington called me mean and it didn’t hurt because he doesn’t really know mebut when you call me mean howard, it smarts!

  8. howardlindzon

    fred we are unfriended! I now like Mike Arrington. Just friended him…and Spitzer. same mold.

  9. Matthew Ogston

    Great idea – an international alternative to SMS subscriptions!

  10. pwb

    Why didn’t IM bots ever take off? Seems like such a no-brainer but I didn’t see anyone other than ActiveBuddy pursue it.

  11. Vasudev Ram

    This looks quite useful; also, I noticed that the messages back to you after you send a request, are almost instantaneous, which is great.Your blog is quite interesting too, in general. Got to know about ElfYourself and Adaptive Blue from it.Thanks,- Vasudev RamSite: http://www.dancingbison.comBlog (on software innovation): jugad.livejournal.com

    1. fredwilson

      Thanks VasudevI hope I can keep turning you on to coll web appsFred

  12. jer979

    like it. would love a way to quickly find all of the twitter bots out there.

  13. John Milner

    This bot does’nt seem to work for me. i never get a response back. I am following mytrade, mytrade is following me, and I am not blocking them. Any suggestions? how i can make this work? i think it would be a great help!

    1. andyswan

      John, the issues should be fixed now. Please retry the application and let me know if you have further problems!

  14. sharetipsinfo

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  15. Mark Gibbs

    Fred,Thanks for the posting — you’d never know about MyTrade’s Twitter bot from their Web site.FYI: Your link to “mytrade’s twitter page” is wrong — it is currently (as of 4/13/09 @ 10:42PST) pointing to http://twitter.com//mytrade … the “//” should be “/”.Cheers,Mark Gibbs (Twitter: quistuipater).

    1. Mark Gibbs

      Rats … misread the posting’s year …. looks like mytrade is dead in the water.[mg]

  16. Ken Jarvis

    Can I track a stock on here?How do I grack GM?Thanks