Sometimes it's good to have a light/noisy feed, and IRC is just fine for that job.
Your shared history vanishes when you're off the network though. Skype has channels, and preserves history, syncing your "rooms" when you log back in.
If it were as easy to pipe machine data (syslog, notices, tweets?) into Skype as it is to pipe it into IRC, it'd be perfect.
Plus with IRC you have the assurance that it will never go away. Worse case scenario is you just write your own server and do it yourself. There is no RFC for skype though.
when I disconnect, it automatically sets me /away, and renames my nick to e1ven_zz to make it clear to the rest of the team I'm away.. When I log back in, it renames me back to e1ven, and streams everything I missed.
The Air app for desktop can sometimes have performance issues for no particular reason. They're about to release a native OS X app though so that should solve this for a large amount of users.
The android application in woeful. It consistently logs me out and forgets my password which means that it's totally unusable for out of office notifications from people. I've had to rely more on their email notifications for unread personal messages than their Android app. It's a real shame because I could see myself getting a lot more use out of Hipchat if it worked well enough.
The best way to access hipchat that I've seen so far was just a jabber client - xmpp seems to be the backend of their service.
And my coworkers really love the web client. And some use xmpp. Many of us regularly use the iOS app. I guess that's one of the strength's of hipchat, the variety of access methods that all feel basically first-class. (and one person on our team even uses the SMS integration.)
In the case of links, a little bit of Python and the phenny framework let me write a bot that scraped links and post them to a private Twitter feed. That's a lot more flexible than a wiki for my purposes.
