In the wake of the European PlayStation Forums’ announcement that they’ll be offline next week for a PSN authentication update, we also have a related story that will surely be very exciting for many PS3 owners. According to a thread on the official PlayStation.com Forums, there’s finally a light at the end of the long, dark tunnel of waiting for PlayStation Home.

Forum member ‘patches 4 socom 3’ received the May 08 issue of PlayStation: The Official Magazine, and found a neat surprise within its glossy pages. It came in the form of an article called “PlayStation POV: PLAYSTATION Network in ’08”, authored by Susan Panico, the Senior Director of the PSN. Towards the end of the piece, she confirmed that Sony will shortly be making their Home beta (which has been invitation-only thus far) open to the public.

This is obviously huge news for all the PS3 owners that have been waiting with bated breath for a peek at what Home is all about (and probably even for those people who have been breathing normally). Personally, Home always piqued my interest somewhat, but I’ve never been dying to try it out. And of course, the endless delays have only caused my curiosity to wane. Still, I try to reserve judgment before I actually have hands-on time with things, so I’ll definitely give the public beta a shot.

So far, I only know of one Dtoider who has been in on the private beta: decoyb. With nearly 22,000 registered accounts, you think we’d have at least a few people that Sony picked...has anyone else been experimenting with their virtual apartment? And do you guys even care about Home at this point? Well, if you do, I’ve attached the three photos that the forumite snapped; the header image is one of them, with the important parts (poorly) highlighted.

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I'm not overly hyped about it but I do want to give it a try. I'm looking forward to Littlebigplanet much, much more but this is still cool.

it's free, it should be interested, so either way I can't really complain. If it cost me $49.99 and was a flop then I'd have reason to be skeptical. but at the super low price of FREE, I'll give it a whirl