@Twitter, Finance Apps Sprout

@Nu twtr apps for fin strt ppng up.

And now in non-Twitter-speak: the Twitter explosion has started a rush of development of finance-related applications for the site. We’ve already written about the mega growth of Twitter in recent months. The subcontext of that has been an expectation that the site will spawn personal finance-related applications for its minions of users.

Well, wait no longer. The Twitter revolution has begun. Here is a quick rundown – meaning a bit more extensive than an average tweet — of the leading Twitter finance applications today:

Payments

There are at least three payments applications for Twitter currently: TwitPay, Twollars, and Twipper. We’ve written about TwitPay before. Like the two other services, TwitPay aims to facilitate financial transactions on Twitter. TwitPay takes a fee of $0.05 per $0.99 of payment. Twollars is positioning its service as more of a facilitator of charitable donations, although it seems to be well-suited for bread-and-butter online transactions, much as PayPal is on the internet. Twipper, meanwhile, boasts that its payment service is easy to use and seamlessly integrated into Twitter. The service, which is still in beta, is working on integrating with Paypal to add funds to a users Twipper account.

Money Management

At least three applications have been launched in this space: Harvest, Xpenser, and Tweetwhatyouspend. All three do essentially the same thing, and that is allow you to tweet your expenses from your mobile phone. To explain, let’s say you are in a taxi and pay the driver $20. You can use one of these applications to send a Twitter tweet that says something like, “d harvest e 25.25 lunch at Balthazar” (in the case of Harvest), and the application will record that expense for accounting purposes. Harvest has the added feature of allowing users to record time allocations, too.

The Markets

The real-time nature of Twitter lends itself to the trigger-finger speed of today’s financial markets. I found two good trading sites that leverage Twitter’s strength. The first is StockTwits. StockTwits offers tweets on stocks in real-time. I just checked it out and one tweet read: “USTs rally strongly into the 7yr auction coming up at 1:00.” That’s in 12 minutes. FxTwits is similar, only it focuses on foreign exchange. It seems to be a less active service than StockTwits.

One More for Good Luck

Monitter is a really good application, and showcases what is awesome about Twitter. The app allows you to enter any three keywords and monitor the cascade of tweets on the topic. I entered “banking,” “mortgage,” and “finance,” and the screen just blinked with tweets. It’s the web in real time, which is super cool. But then again that’s what Twitter is all about.

For ongoing coverage of the Twitter revolution, go to our TwitBanking group.

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