Before, you couldn't trade with someone on Steam who was offline and you would often have to discuss what you wanted to trade before actually making the trade. It was all a bit of a faff. Well now things are going to be simplified.

Soon users will be able to put together a trade offer from items in each participant's inventory. They can then send that offer to an online or offline friend, for that other user to peruse at their leisure. The user who receives a trade offer will be notified of it the next time they log in via a green drop down notification in the Steam client (or on the browser page). The user can then respond by accepting or declining the offer or by making a counter-offer. Trades that have not been accepted, declined or countered will expire after 2 weeks as well.

You can assemble your own trade offer from the new trade offers page in either your own inventory or the inventory page of the user you want to trade with. You can also do this from any badge page. On top of this you can make the same offer to more than one user though once someone accepts your trade, pending offers involving the same things shall disappear from the other user's offers page.

For obvious reasons you won't be able to make offers to a user who has their inventory set to 'private'. And, at the moment, you can't make an offer to anyone not on your friends list though Valve has implied that they might change this later on.

These tweaks to the system may make Steam's whole trading card business that bit more appealing to some. So, I've only got one question: who wants to trade?