Too many times while participating in online investing forums or having conversations on Facebook or twitter, I've wanted to link to charts with annotations to highlight some point or question that I've had. In reading the posts of others, most don't link to charts or when they do, they link to plain charts where the point gets lost.

To address this and make engaging in online investment discussions easier, we've added a SHARE button to Personal Stock Monitor charts that allows you to upload an annotated chart along with a microblog update (a so called 'tweet').

For example here's a 1 year chart of CSX with some annotations and an update.

Each post gets it's own unique web URL, called a permalink, which you can send in email or post to other sites. Each post also has a convenient little "Share" link that lets you cross post the chart to other sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Beyond just having a convenient way of sharing a chart, you can invite people into a conversation around your chart. Other CollabInvest members can post comments to your chart and you will automatically be notified when this happens.

You can see the posts of other members by going to the home page and clicking on the All Public Updates link.This will show you a list of all the most recent posts made by anyone who has a their profile set to public.

From this list you can choose those you would like to follow. By default, after you log in and go to the homepage you'll see only those posts by your friends and those you are following. As such this is a hybrid of the approaches used by Facebook and Twitter.

From your own profile you can get a list of who you are following and who is following you.

You can opt to set your profile privacy setting to "Friends Only" which will prevent anyone who is not in your friends list from seeing your posts.

To lock down your profile completely, you can set your privacy setting to private.

In your posts, you can opt to direct a post at a given member using the @ symbol. For instance, if you add @Yermo to your post, I'll get an email indicating that you've sent me a direct message. This is a good way to alerting someone to see a chart (if they are member). 

You can also tag posts into categories using the twitter like #tag notation. This lets your organize your posts.