Wall Street, meet Twitter (now on those fancy Bloomberg terminals)

The big Wall Street banks are among the last Twitterless bastions of the American workplace. But even their high walls are crumbling thanks to a new Bloomberg terminal product — and perhaps a recent U.S. Securities and Exchange decision on Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

Today, Bloomberg announced that it will be the first financial information platform to integrate real-time Twitter feeds directly into investors’ data workflows. Two days ago, the SEC had said that, yes, Reed Hastings could communicate to the public via social media after staff at the securities watchdog had recommended he be charged for revealing material company information via Facebook.

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With new capabilities come new requirements, Bloomberg says:

“When important news is shared on Twitter, traders and investors need to be able to access it, and validate its importance in order to incorporate that information into their decision making process,” Jean-Paul Zammitt, the head of sales and product development, said in a statement.

But it won’t just be a firehose of tweets in your Bloomberg terminal, the company says. Rather, tweets will be classified by company, asset class, person, and topic. And they’ll be integrated with Bloomberg’s existing financial services data stream, so there’s no switching views or checking different systems. Users can also create custom alerts to monitor “unusual bursts of social media chatter about a company.”

Whether this is helpful for notoriously rapid-fire day traders or harmful remains to be seen. But you can bet that legendary long-term value investor Warren Buffet won’t be checking the tweetstream before making his investments.

At least some are sold.

“It is extremely valuable to our business to be able to access this information on the Bloomberg Professional service in the same manner we use it for other market related applications and analytics,” said Karl Braasch, a fund manager and cofounder of Bristlecone Capital Partners.

photo credit: Christopher Chan via photopin cc