What solution would you suggest for implementing both chat and IM on the site?

Question

Should I pick up IRC or go another route? What I need are public chat and private instant messaging on my social network. I do not wish to use 3rd-party solutions. (I plan to rent VPS for the matter.)

Answer 1

Well IRC is always good for chat, not so much for IM, unless you use DCC or Queries, and that could get complicated. If you're advanced in all of this, I suppose IRC would work for private messaging, but you should definitely think of something else instead.

(But keep in mind that IRC is absolutely wonderful for public chatting)

Answer 2

You could try Jabber/XMPP. Jabber's a chat "application" built on top of the XMPP message transport layer; XMPP also supports direct user-to-user messaging, which is your IM. I've seen implementations of clients that were in webpages (AIUI, it's used to power GTalk and Google Wave) and there are numerous client applications available.