Friday March 10th
Friends beta going public next week

The Friends system is nearing the end of its beta phase, and will soon be available to everyone running Steam. Friends allows you to see when your friends are playing games, and lets users chat with each other both inside and outside of many Steam games. There are also a number of additional features we'll be adding to it over time. Early next week, we'll be updating Steam with a convenient way to join the Friends beta. See the Steam Update (http://www.steampowered.com/Steam/Marketing/March10.2006//?l=english).

Changes

Added friends beta opt-in button and dialog
it is now necessary to opt-in to Friends to access its functionality.
Added 'System information' option in the help menu to re-access the survey hardware data
Updated survey with some detection fixes
Fixed serverbrowser not displaying mod names correctly in game
Fixed bug with offline mode not working for users who account names that are all digits with leading zeros
Changed Friends desired persona state (online/away/busy/offline) to be saved across client sessions
Localization updates