If you want to see what the Wall Street speculators on Twitter are talking about, head over to StockTwits and check out the info in tag cloud form, in stream form, or by searching. Each tweet is displayed under a graph of the recent performance of the stock mentioned. There's also a cloud of users, so you can easily locate your fellow investment junkies and connect with them over Twitter. Of course, we can't vouch for any of the advice you might get, but this looks like an intelligent use of microblogging technology.

[Via Tim Sykes]

For some bizarre reason, the Official Gmail Blog has announced a new feature for Google Calendar that is powered by Google Finance. Nevertheless, it's a pretty cool new trick: now, you can search for your favorite stock symbol in Google Calendar to add a repeating all-day event of that stock's closing price each day. If you've been looking for an easy, casual way to keep track of a few stocks without having to dive into more serious solutions, this is a great way to keep an eye on a stock over time.

In an effort to stay hot on Yahoo!'s tail, Google has updated Google Finance. It's only been six months in the running, and now its time for a change. In this update, Google has added data and charts for up to 40 years of US stocks. A new homepage design lets users see currency and sector information instantly, as well as a listing of top movers. Registered users on the site have the ability to build portfolios and track stocks and companies. Users can also upload information from other online portfolios into their Google Finance portfolio. The new beta design launched on Tuesday. Don't forget to also add your Google Finance portfolio to your start page.

So what do you think? Is it a Yahoo! Finance killer yet?

Fellow AOL blogger Tom Taulli at Blogging Stocks speculates that YouTube may be preparing for an IPO. The evidence? 1) YouTube's investor is Sequoia Capital, which was also an early investor in Google and "is not about making a great returns on its investments; rather, it wants to make blow-out returns." 2) YouTube just hired Gideo Yu, former Yahoo! treasurer, to be its CFO. Despite YouTube's youth--it was founded just 19 months ago--Taulli says a YouTube IPO would be "easy" considering its 40% market share and 100 million videos viewed each day.

Free streaming stock quotes have made an appearance on Yahoo! Finance with little to no fanfare. Above the charts on the individual stock pages and on Yahoo Finance's front page you will see . Click the "On" button provides a drop down display of streaming stock price information. Click on the "?" and learn that you can leave this open for up to 25 minutes and although these are streaming, they are not "real-time". They are delayed 15 minutes.

Streaming quotes has only been offered with real-time information as part of a Yahoo Finance premium service package.

We are starting up a new little feature at the Download Squad called Googleholic. Googleholic will be broadcast twice a week profiling a few smaller but interesting Google facts, tips, and news items.

So let's get started!

Earlier this week Yahoo! announced changes that would roll out soon to upgrade aspects of the Yahoo! Finance property. One of these changes, and probably the most significant for daily users, is the completely overhauled Stock Charts.

When Google rolled out Google Finance property, most of the hubbub around their offering was the dynamic charts. These hadn't been seen before anywhere and had a lot of "kewl" factor in them. Even without the kewl charts, Yahoo! continued to be the most comprehensive and most visited financial resource on the web. And now, Y! is rolling out their version of dynamic stock charts with lots of "kewl" factor. Read on for an overview of the new features and my thoughts.

Yahoo! announced in a press release that many long-awaited upgrades were soon to appear on Yahoo! Finance, albeit some only in beta form.

Stock Charts - Google showed us that they could beat Yahoo! to the punch with their Ajaxy charting tools. Unfortunately for Google, the financial users are a pragmatic bunch and need more than the "kewl" factor to make them switch as indicated by Yahoo! continuing to hold the financial users' interest. According to this recent announcement, Y! Finance users will soon be enjoying new kewl dynamic charting tools which take advantage of Flash and DHTML . It pays to be patient, eh?

Message boards - Yahoo! has been upgrading its message boards throughout its many sites for many months now. Yahoo! Finance has seen some of these changes already. Easier search, threaded views and now a rating system to quickly locate quality contributors to the conversation.

Y! Finance Badge - Y! Finance badges for your website have been out in beta for a while now but according to this announcement are out of beta and available for general consumption.

Y! Finance Videos - Y! has made huge advances recently in its ability to serve video regardless of where it is hosted. This is spreading to various Y! sites including Y! Finance. Today's announcement points out that video from several news sources are being made available via the Y! Finance site.

The new stock charts are being evasive. Hopefully we will see them in action soon even if only on a beta version of the Y! Finance site.

UPDATE: The new chart tools are being rolled out to small percentage of users for now. This is much as the ! home page revision was revealed to only a few users for their feedback before opening it up to all Y! home page visitors. More Y! Finance users can expect to see the new chart tools as time goes by.

After last month's rumors, Google took nobody by surprise today with the launch of Google Finance. The new financial portal is pretty slick, with a similar feel to Google Maps. Stock charts are powered by Flash rather than AJAX and have a very flexible interface. Along with all the usual info like market cap, volume, and so on, Google Finance also annotates its charts with recent news articles and even blog and newsgroup chatter. One feature I found cute is the "Management" are of the page that lists the company's higher ups—if you hover your mouse over one of their names, a little headshot of them will pop up. Ironically, when I hit the page for Apple (AAPL), it showed no photo for Steve Jobs, possibly the most-photographed CEO in the valley.

This one falls firmly into the wild speculation category, but Search Engine Journal is reporting that this morning it saw a number of referrals from google.com/finance. The requests came from Google IPs and the referrers included queries for "GOOG," Google's stock symbol, and led to SEJ's most recent articles about Google. This would seem to indicate that google.com/finance is a site that rolls stock information, business news, and other relevant Google content into one portal. Google PR is characteristically mum, saying only, "We’re always exploring opportunities to expand our offerings, but don’t have anything to announce at this time." I agree with SEJ: The fact that Google Finance has its own google.com URL (and not just an internal Google IP) would seem to indicate that whatever it is, it's pretty close to launch. (And yes, the "logo" above is faked by me.)

[Via Jeremy Zawodny]