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.
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.