As people try and make IRC and XMPP bindings for chat, they all seem to be using the same inefficient and undocumented AJAX based system to communicate to the chat server by simply reverse engineering chat with Firebug. All current implementations are messy, unreliable, and incomplete. And new people who want to make their own bindings must figure everything out for themselves.

But what if chat had a streaming API, sort of like Twitter's Streaming API? This would allow people to use an actual documented and official API, as well as get an actual stream instead of AJAX which is closer to what a chat is.

Login would be the only issue, since this site is based on OpenID's instead of normal logins. Some kind of system would need to be setup to make sure user names = SO names. This is a complicated issue, but does need to be solved. From my view it looks like the only hurdle in creating any 3rd party application.

We do though have to balance paranoia with usability. You could make it really secure but so annoying to use that users won't use it, app developers won't bother, and apps might just come up with workarounds. We just have to understand that were not in a browser anymore, and OpenID wasn't meant to be used outside of the browser.

So minus the authentication issues, what do you think of the idea as a whole?

If you like the idea, how would you solve the authentication issue?