This is an IRC client for Gmail. It's based around a Chrome app that uses the experimental socket support in Chrome. It may stop working in a future version of Chrome as it is experimental!
Currently requires the dev channel version of Chrome, or Canary
First you need to enable Experimental Extension APIs in Chrome. You can do this by going to chrome://flags and searching for "Experimental Extension APIs" and clicking Enable. You'll have to restart Chrome.
Now you can download and install the extension. It's currently available as a package here: https://github.com/progrium/irc-for-gmail/downloads
It should download, ask for permissions, and then it should show up when you use Gmail.
The client is very minimal. You can currently just connect to a server, change your nick, join channels, and chat. You can also list names of who is in a room since there is currently no list in the UI. For a list of commands, type /help in the chat box.
This project mostly wraps another standalone IRC client for Chrome. Most of the IRC client specific stuff is there. This app just packages it up to be used in Gmail.
To contribute to the actual IRC client, make contributions here: https://github.com/progrium/ircv