i would rather have the gnutella clients leave chat to the experts- AIM, ICQ, etc etc.... i mean, they're experts on running chat services, so why overlook them? maybe just make it easier to associate your screen names with your current IP.

one way to pull this off would be for developers to add another query code which reports back the screen name. or a function similar to "get web page", that returns text from a file with contact info in it (if the user so desires to list theirs).

a better solution would be to create an independent p2p chat client that piggybacks gnutella connections. then, all the developers could pipe chat requests to and from that program. there are a lot of ways to create a chat handler, does anyone have any ideas on what would be best?