I would love some feedback on the existing basic chat features as well as some guidance as to whether it's worth putting time into fleshing out the developer specific features.
It's worth noting that you can create your own rooms now if you want to play around with it. Just go to http://hc.io/<room-name>;
Maybe I'm too old school, but I suspect IRC will be hard to beat. There are many clients available that fit many different user types (hard-core console users all the way to web frontends) and much infrastructure available (bots, servers, etc.).
Like the easier room creation and code highlighting. Seems to work really well. Private messages and privates rooms would be great. Also interfacing with IRC would be cool.
Private messages and viewing chat history for a specific date instead of relying on a search would be a good start.