Again, it increases the size of the gnutella clients, and a user could easily just start an IRC application of their own choice, and there are applications that are created specificly for IRC and will support all the features associated with IRC, that would take a while before the gnutella clients supported all of the nice features.

I dont imagine chatting over the gnutella network because the gnutella network is for searching for location of files and downloading them. The only thing, some thing similar to the gnutella network could be done for chatting is, searching for users or chat rooms but not for actual conversations. Conversations would need to be handled slightly diffrently, instead of sending search requests, it would need to be made to send messages.

The only way IRC would be integrated into a gnutella client is if there was a special relationship between gnutella hosts and IRC. For example, if a user wants to, they could give out information that they are in an IRC chat room, this way when you download a file from someone and wish to talk to them, or if someone is downloading from you and you wish to talk to them, then you could query their gnutella client directly P2P (not through gnutella protocol), and their computer will inform your computer that they are in a chat room, you can then go to that chat room. This way people of common interest could chat with each other. This is the only reasonable way I could imagine IRC being integrated into a gnutella client, in order to make the process seamless, other wise its pointless and users could just download and install and use a real IRC client instead.

I'm not saying chatting will not enhance it, I'm just arguing that if the 2 are unrelated then there is not point in integrating them, because a user can simply run 2 applications at once, rather then users who dont want to chat having an application that takes more memory (bloated) to add in these features they dont use, when it doesnt have to have them. What might be even better, is if the gnutella application could launch the IRC chat client of your choice automaticly connecting to the server and chatroom for you (assuming the IRC client of choice is capable of this automated task), rather then have IRC built into it.