@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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Comment by Kelly Rusk on March 26, 2009 at 1:21pm: Question about the Money Management apps: When you "tweet" your expenses, is it only in Direct Messages, or are you telling all your followers what you spend??

Comment by Debbie Pfeifer on March 26, 2009 at 1:22pm: Hey, JJ.

Since Wesabe launched our Twitter integration in August ( http://blog.wesabe.com/2008/08/04/add-transactions-to-wesabe-through-twitter/ ) we've had a hugely positive response from folks who use it to track and categorize their expenses on the go. Definitely an area that is really taking off.

Comment by JJ Hornblass on March 26, 2009 at 1:26pm: Kelly, Direct. Check out the demo for Tweetwhatyouspend here.

Comment by JJ Hornblass on March 26, 2009 at 1:27pm: Debbie, thanks. I missed that one. Here's a live link to Wesabe's Twitter info.

Comment by Debbie Pfeifer on March 26, 2009 at 3:41pm: No problem, JJ! Thanks for the link.

And Kelly, with Wesabe you have a choice of either sending a private, direct message to your Wesabe account or a public message that everyone following you on Twitter can see. Why the heck would you want to do that? Well, in addition to letting you enter the amount and tags, Wesabe lets you add notes. If you tried a new restaurant and wanted to share, your Tweet could read: @wesabe Lucky Pho $17.24 (restaurant seattle) # awesome new place on Fremont Ave.

Comment by JJ Hornblass on March 26, 2009 at 3:43pm: Did either of you check the Tweetwhatyouspend demo? What did you think?

Comment by Debbie Pfeifer on March 26, 2009 at 4:21pm: The key here is clearly the mobile updates - with any of the money management tools you've listed, you can order your coffee and tweet the transaction while your drink is being made! I like tweetwhatyouspend's click and drag classification system, but wonder if their pre-made categories may be limiting for some folks... one major category of tweets we receive is "to_expense" - basically, people out on a business trip, tweeting cab fares and quick meals. Not a "standard" category.

These are fun stand-alone tools that can help people get a grip on their cash spending, so we give them a thumbs up. Since Wesabe is a larger money management platform, we're using Twitter updates as a way for members to not just track their cash expenses, but to see this spending as part of their larger financial picture.

Comment by dmgerbino on March 26, 2009 at 8:20pm: I use Xpen$er and like its flexibility. However, I do not update it with twitter. Instead I use the Dial2Do service to update Xpen$er with my voice and my cellphone. I can also listen to and send e-mail and texts via speakling into my cell phone. They also interface with Twitter. This company is the tech behind TwitterFone.

@dmgerbino