Skype opened up the beta for their new Multi-party Chat. I had a chance to meet its developers in Estonia and have been playing with it for a little while.

It is pretty slick in its early form and will bring many of the virtues of IRC to a wider audience (sorry, no bots yet). The default chat window is multi-user enabled, so expect heavy use of this feature. The big difference with IRC is that you have to be invited into a chat and history is stored by default. The easy group forming properties and functional profiles are fantastic. Of course, it meshes will with their conference call capability (Stuart Henshall already demands greater scale. Of course, their P2P architecture means no server will be overloaded.

You can recall past chats as groups, but it still doesn’t treat groups as first class objects in the system and the persistence of history with fluid groups leads to less comfortable context shifting. The beta is windows only.