It's me! Well, at least if you're signed into Digg, it is. As reported at TheGoogleCache, all you have to do to be added as someone's friend on Digg is to get them to visit

http://digg.com/invitefrom/yourname

while they are logged into Digg. Visiting this URL adds you as their friend without requiring any confirmation, and because of this, I've just added myself as your newest Digg friend by including an iframe on this page that loads that URL. Thanks, friend!

Netscape has a similar feature, but we require you to actually confirm that you want to add that user as a friend. I predict that Digg will be following suit very soon.

Update: It appears that this bug has been fixed. Way to go, Digg.

Netscape's OpenID support is live. This release also greatly simplifies the signup process by removing the captcha and the request for other information that was previously required for registration.

The announcement just went public that, starting on Monday, Netscape.com and My.Netscape will support signup/signin via OpenID, and consequently, AOL screennames (AOL hosts an OpenID for each registered screenname). I've used the OpenID registration/signin process in our QA environment, and it is slick. Kudos to Blaine and Trey on this awesome new feature.

P.S. I know I'm biased, but I love it when a service delivers new features rather than just promising to get around to them.

At the moment, the top nine links at Reddit (plus 2 more in the next 15) are to various articles on the futile grassroots efforts to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

Never mind that none of these impeachment proceedings are being carried out by any government bodies with legitimate power and that none will result in any sort of Congressional action - a site with 45% of its front page links dedicated to one political story does not amount to displaying "what's new online;" it's displaying "what's new in our community's agenda." On any other large social news site (like Netscape or Digg), 8 of the 9 links would be flagged as duplicates and removed so that the front page (the site's most valuable asset) actually has value to the readers who don't care about meaningless grassroots impeachment resolutions.

I suppose this kind of gaming is the Reddit's community prerogative, but I'll be avoiding Reddit for at least a few weeks until this little impeachment-fest dies down and they're linking to interesting content again.

My latest teaser for Netscape 9 is up at the Netscape blog:

"Netscape 9 will include built-in tools to share, vote for, and discuss interesting things you find on the Web directly from the browser's URL bar. [...] We feel that having these tools in the browser by default will introduce the idea of social news to a whole new set of users, and it should make it easier for those who are already familiar with the concept."

Something I'll add here is that while this announcement reveals the main pieces of this feature (in-browser voting), it does not reveal all of the features of this piece.

There's an additional forum for discussion at Netscape.com.