[otoburb]

The watercooler is a great idea for distributed teams who lean more heavily towards chat as their communication medium.

Because my teams are typically customer facing, we have enough team conference calls (both internal and external) that there are enough moments for people to perform a similar function, albeit most of the time truncated or abrupt.

I share your enthusiasm for chat rooms ala IRC but as you've already noticed this only appeals to a certain subset of [technology] people. #w00w00 is more of an exception in my mind; most IRC channels aren't exactly the hotbed of singularly driven participants, but then maybe the channels I frequented had a low SNR.

>Another thing I've done on some teams is after a major release or milestone achieved, everyone grabs a drink of their choice and joins a group video chat and virtually goes out to the bar to celebrate as a group.

This is a good idea! When a sufficiently important milestone is completed I endeavour to have geographically close clusters of folks fly/drive to meet up, if possible. However, joining a group video chat (hell, video chat in general) would be interesting to introduce. I think video goes a long way to closing the personal gap because you can immediately pair a face with a known name and voice. Sadly (in my view anyway), there are a few folks I still haven't met in my organization face-to-face despite working over 8 years together.

Re. small gifts -- completely agreed.