New chat feature?

[mtrawls]

In the continued tradition of making Brandon do as much work as possible, I present the following idea: a "chat" feature. I.e., something akin to AIM or ICQ, etc. For a similar feature on another message board, see perlmonks.com (you must be logged on to contribute, but anyone can read the chat area) -- their chat feature is called the "chatterbox", quite appropriately. It's just an unobtrusive box on the side of the screen that includes the most recent text, which appears on most of the pages.

I was motivated to this suggestion by the posts here and especially here. (I certainly don't mean to pick on Raven_Writer.) The reason is that the second post, especially, seems like a conversation that is more appropriate for a chat program like AIM; but there can certainly be a case made for it being posted to a forum like this, even though it is not specifically targeted to the subject in any way. I was trying to decide whether the incident meritted a negative repuatation, and when I had just about decided to PM him about it as a "warning" (more of an inquisitive manner directed to see why he thought it was appropriate I guess), I thought of this idea.

Using the forums in a way like you would use AIM is inappropriate, it seems (though I couldn't find anything in the rules). But often times there is some justified need for this. The chit-chat forums are a very useful outlet for many cases, but there are some instances where the discussion is ephemeral, and not worthy of (or rather, not needing) recording for all posterity. An example would be the posts above, or maybe some tangential discussion, or something even along the lines of "any advice for new programmers" -- sure there are threads galore on this, but having a chat feature where a quick, almost immediate answer to this to point the user to those threads and other resources, without cluttering up the forums with repeated posts, might very well alleviate the problem.

Before anyone gets all excited about it, though, let me say there there are tons of problems with the idea. It seems to re-invent the wheel -- why include this, if people can just go on AIM (or some other program) and talk to each other already. It seems to be time intensive, error-prone, and would require some re-structuring, perhaps, of the site's layout. It might not be needed; either the above cases being inappropriate for the site, or the rarity of them (and their occurrence in off-season) not making necessary anything special.

But, to counter that, the CD community is a specialized niche. It would be nice to be able to say something that everyone browsing could immediately see, without having to make something as permanent as a post (perhaps the subject is less important, or even just a casual "any late-nighters this midnight?") It could, undoubtedly, be an important tool -- but there is still a question of is it a needed tool. I urge those interested to see perlmonks.com, and look at how their CB is used.

/end friendly, helpful but perhaps completely impractical or unnecessary suggestion
/begin flaming


EDIT
In response to "A.12.3" -- there are more than several ways to handle this, but the primary intent of this discussion isn't the implementation but rather the merits of the idea itself.