Slack, HipChat, Flowdock and others are all the rave now but wait, wasn’t there something like that like… mmm… 5 (!!!) years ago? There certainly was something like that and actually much, much better thing. It was called Google Wave, now defunct.
It even had the bot functionality back then and many more features which were apparently waaay ahead of its time. It took 5 years and a company that only does that (that would be Slack) to get everyone who’s anyone to drink their cool aid.