[zomg]

thinking out loud here, but has anyone built a solution on top of IRC, effectively "extending" it?

to me (i'm not a developer, so pardon me while i speak out of turn here) it would make a lot of sense to take the solid, well known foundation of IRC and build upon it, instead of reinventing the wheel over and over again, no?

[Lightkey]

It's probably not a good example but that is what Twitch did, you can connect to their video channels with standard IRC clients (without the added "features" like paid subscription picture "emotes").