the "lobby"

I play regularly Ticket to ride on days of Wonders web site. It's quite different from here as it's real time... There's one thing though that we could copy... They have a thing called the lobby in which all players who are connected are accessible, and you can send messages to all, such as "who's in for a quick five?" etc.

I often wonder if and how I could send that kind of message arround to all players connected, so that we can start a game on the moment or just exchange our views. Does it exist already? If not could we open something like that?...

another feature that is great for newcomers on their site is the possibility to sit and watch a game that is played by others. Many poeple enjoy watching top ranking players and their forum is filled with discussions about "I say you use such and such clever strategy, but blah blah blah ...etc." could this be an option for us?

It is a simple site with HTML with PHP+MySQL. I dont want to make more serious and client-side programing like java to make a chat or a real-time game. In the link section there are a client-server (realtime) implementation of Citadels. It can easily played by IRC.
(you can enter in any game to observe it, it is not necesary to be a player of the game, but it could be too much boring to watch a whole game...)

Achiles(X)

I understand this Achilles, but could we just have a simple feature allowing us to send a message to all connected?

So that we can send a message like "who would join a quick game for 3?" and see the result... In that way we may be able to set quick games without necessarily calling on friends...

Cheers
François.