The Community Team Coordinator for Sony's European side of the PlayStation forums dropped the news today about a PSN authentication update and some forum downtime that's going to happen as a result of this. Read on: 

 "From Monday 14 April onwards, you will need to log in to the Forums with your PSN Sign-In ID (email address) and PSN password. Your Forum name (i.e. the name that will appear on your public profile and next to your forum posts) will be your PSN Online ID. If you haven’t already, please make sure that you have linked your Forum account with your PSN. Guidance on how to do this can be found here. But don’t worry if you don’t manage to link your accounts in time, you will be able to log in to the forums and post using any valid PSN account.

To allow us to update the Forums in preparation for this change, they will be offline for one week from midnight on Sunday 6 April until noon on Monday 14 April. Once again, we’re very sorry that this roll-out was delayed from its original launch date but we’ll look forward to seeing you back in the Forums after Monday 14st April."

Since we all know that Destructoid's own dedicated forums are where all the cool kids hang out, that last part might now mean much to you. However, the underlying message is clear. While HOME may not be upon us just yet, Sony is hard at work in preparation for when it is. Those on Xbox Live already enjoy this feature, but (supposedly) PlayStation fans should soon be able to access their friends and messaging from the comfort of their PC, for those times when a PS3 just isn't available.

No word yet on when this integration will come to the U.S. forums (unless I somehow overlooked it), but we'll keep an eye out for it. In the meantime, we're always listening Sony, if you'd like to clarify this some more.