Temporary process at the moment to manage the flood of new accounts trying to be made and hopefully prevent mass sock-pocket account creation in the early days. A lot of "less-than-ethical" steemit folk trying to push their way in to setup shop with their old steemit schemes.
We are close to releasing a fully automated account creation process with various ways to verify human owners.
That's good to know. Well it's not like I'm not plenty busy with writing I'm doing already. But would love to connect with those folks too.