New channels of electronic communication have been a boon to many industries, opening up sales and marketing opportunities, helping improve customer service and speeding up innovation and collaboration. For Wall Street, however, the benefits of technology such as Twitter have to be weighed against the compliance pains.

Twitter, launched by San Francisco-based Obvious in late 2006 before being spun off, is a cross between an online discussion board and instant messaging system, allowing people to post short updates-capped at 140 characters-on their activities. Users can subscribe to each other's updates, or tweets, and have them sent to their Twitter screens. Some Twitter posters develop armies of followers.

Early adopters, as with most other social media platforms, were primarily teenage girls and the technology obsessed. But usage has spread quickly in recent months-the platform regularly grinds to a halt due to heavy traffic-and Twitter, with its powerful community-creation mechanism, is becoming widespread among groups such as venture capitalists, journalists and stock traders.

Because members select the people they want to follow, Twitter communities are self-organizing. Twitterers can see who the users they follow subscribe to and follow them as well.

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