Add news to the stream?

I am trying to make it easy for our members to post to their stream, and think I must be missing something obvious.

If a user goes to their own profile, they can post to the stream from there. However, for my website to work, I need to make it much more available (and obvious) than this.

I have assumed that there would be a module or component that would allow me to provide this functionality, either as a target of a menu option, or as a module that I could include on any page I choose.

Have I missed something? if so, what, where and how?

Or is this missing functionality that still needs to be created? if so, what are the current timescales for this feature?

Kind regards,

Michael