Thanks for the suggestions! Those are good ideas. I was hoping to have something even easier, like a button or link to click that would auto-add the person to the buddy list, as well as a page that would aggregate new posts from the buddy list members.
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It's all fine and dandy until someone has to look at the code.
There are buttons (links) in the Personal Nodelet that will add a page — it could be a user's homenode — to your scratchpad or Personal Nodelet. With some additional scripting in your Free Nodelet, you could probably add the extra bits you're talking about.