Lots of places log IRC and host the logs. That might not be your cup of tea, but it's far from hard. In addition to privacy issues (many individuals don't appr

Lots of places log IRC and host the logs. That might not be your cup of tea, but it's far from hard. In addition to privacy issues (many individuals don't approve of logging of what they perceive to be ephemeral 'hallway' conversations), there's the simple fact that these types of conversation don't lend themselves to well thought out messages -- as you noted with: "you can't really 'write up' something in IRC the way that you can compose an email." Why not create a web forum/usenet/mailinglist gateway? I'm sure nobody would object if you did -- Jive Forums (when the product still existed[1]) used to support both web-based and NNTP-based access. [1] Jive Software was profitable[2] and engineering focused, and Jive Forums was a great product. They had both large and small customers, ranging from Amazon, Apple, and EA to numerous small businesses that required quality collaboration software -- jabber, forums, etc. Then they took a massive, unnecessary $15 million investment from Sequoia Capital in 2007, hired a Chief Marketing Officer, completely fouled up their product line in "simplifying" it, and wound up having to raise another $12 million in series B funding in 2009 to keep the now-bloated machine running. They had to lay off a (reported) third of their staff in 2008 (but kept the 'CMO' position). Waste of a good company with a solid set of collaboration products and a solid engineering team. Trimming down their product lines and raising their prices has left them out of reach of SMBs, and the "one size fits all" product completely ignores this straight-forward e-mail/forums/web problem space. It also leaves a large market opportunity for someone to write a forums system that doesn't suck -- a surprising number of large corporations are still slaved to Jive Software's increasingly hefty licensing fees. [2] http://www.jivesoftware.com/jivespace/community/jivetalks/blog/2007/08/22/more-on-our-15m-funding-round-with-sequoia http://www.jivesoftware.com/jivespace/community/jivetalks/bl... Why did we raise the money? Since the beginning, we have had a vision of open collaboration and how it can fundamentally transform the way a company works. Now the market is starting to agree with that vision and is seeing the benefits. We're proud of how we have grown this business over the last six years. We've been profitable since inception and have put good money in the bank. We have made our share of mistakes and missteps, but we haven't sacrificed our values and ultimately those mistakes made us stronger and smarter. This year we struck a mighty vein with Clearspace when we launched in February. Now the growth is in high gear and bringing on a funding partner is a step towards becoming the provider of choice in the market.