Pipe

A friends feed of what? Articles they like? Comments?

In the stream feature of the site, you can see a single individual's stream (here's mine) of articles that they have modded up, but combining the streams of all your friends could be a neat addition that I'll look into.

As for the IRC home, a #pipedot channel on freenode was very briefly occupied two years ago, but was abandoned once soylentnews started their own IRC presence and became much more popular.