I thought about this and it's certainly a possibility. A few things:
1) Primarily, the site is designed for realtime news. So, a very popular news item shouldn't have priority over a recent one. However, you're right in that a particular news item may have affected the price. This is similar to how Google Finance does their charting (with labels overlaid on the share price).
2) It's difficult to work out whether a particular news item actually moved the share price (the timing could be a coincidence, correlation =/= causation etc.)
3) I'll certainly look in to it - thanks for the suggestion
Thanks! It's my first programming work so I doubt it will show off the best methods! But, if there's interest, then sure. Get in touch if you want to chat - http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=marketmonkey
I'm a bit (very) new to programming so I'm not sure how to quantify this answer but:
- Majority of processing done in the browser using jQuery and Javascript
-- Ensures my server doesn't get banned/throttled for too many requests to each of the services.
-- Also means the data is 'as live as possible' as there is no caching in either the client or the server
- Some processing is done server-side
-- Acts as a proxy for some non-JSONP services
-- General parsing/cleaning of feeds
- Services/APIs used where possible
-- Twitter search service is used client side
-- Viralheat Sentiment API is used client side
-- YQL is used client side for some of the calls
I got to learn an enormous amount - feel free to ask any questions or give some feedback.