Setting Up an IRC Channel for Your Brand (Symphony CMS)

Symphony is an XSLT-powered open source content management system. @Czheng, the Symphony Community Lead, sent me a link to discussion within the Symphony Community Forum on the topic of using an IRC Channel for real-time conversations to supplement the forum, and to create a place for the members to 'hang out':

http://symphony-cms.com/discuss/thread/58127/1/

The thread contains several votes in favour of an IRC Channel, and several mentions of Nurph, too. After reading through the thread, I sent a few thoughts across to @Czheng:

- IRC seems to have a couple of votes, however...
- Nurph is easily accessible on a URL, so there's no need for an IRC client
- Nurph has automatic conversation archives on URLs (which makes exporting IRC conversation logs in to XML seem incredibly archaic), e.g. http://blog.nurph.com/how-to-bring-your-twitter-community-together
- Nurph uses your existing @SymphonyCMS Twitter profile branding and design, and it ties in to the tweets from your @SymphonyCMS account. If you've gone to the effort of setting up a Twitter account, Nurph is only adding additional value.

Can you suggest any other pros/cons for either IRC or Nurph when building out a real-time chat community around your brand? And are you considering setting up your own IRC Channel? If so, you might want to check out http://Nurph.com