Twitter Introduces the $Cashtag

Hashtags got a baby brother last night when Twitter rolled out a new feature allowing users to create clickable stock symbols by prefacing them with a dollar sign, an innovation people are already calling the "cashtag." If you were tweeting about Apple, for instance, you could include "$AAPL" in your tweet. Anyone clicking on that cashtag will see what people are saying about that company, TechCrunch reports.

Why didn't anyone think of this sooner? Well, someone did. StockTwits, a microblogging site for investors, has been using the dollar sign tag for years, and its co-founder isn't happy. "It's interesting that Twitter has hijacked our creation," he wrote on his blog. "It only took four years to 'fill' this hole, though a few months back they told me in a detailed email it was not a hole they wanted to fill." He predicts Twitter will have problems curating its content and notes that StockTwits has the investor community that Twitter doesn't. (More Twitter stories.)