Forum Buddies?

[DagBoy]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but at the moment there is currently no use for forum buddies. Therefore I have a suggestion. Although it's probably going to be either difficult or take a lot of time to be able to implement.

Therefore my suggestion is to make forum buddies hold a little bit more relevancy.
Perhaps it would be possible to allow trading between forum members who are buddies without the need to leave one's house constantly. This could be done by linking a user's forum account to their NI account perhaps, although I imagine the difficulty of this would be quite high.

Alternatively there could be a buddy/friend system in game that would allow for the same feature (which I am sure has already been suggested in the past), without the need for linking accounts. Perhaps this could be an in game option where you press escape and there is an "add friend" option and you can select the users you would like to be buddies with.  

Anyway it's just an idea and some feedback would be good. It's definitely far from perfect.

And if forum buddies do have some feature that I am completely unaware of, please share that knowledge with me.