Comment by baby

I don't like the framing on feature vs bug. I think it's a characteristic of IRC that made it nice in some ways, and impractical in other ways. The fact that you knew that people were "on" when they were in the channel, and see exactly how many people where "on" at some point in time was really interesting. Right now all your chat apps are persistent chats so you don't really have that feeling of really being in a "chat room" anymore.

If someone is looking for an ephemeral side-project to work on, it'd be interesting to have something like twitter that works in a similar way: you only see tweets posted when you're online on the page.