does mylot need a chat messenger?

For a site like Mylot, I'm not really sure it makes a lot of sense. Mylot revolves around discussions, and moving that to private chat would kind of defeat the purpose. And if you just want to socially chit chat with people the private message feature seems sufficient. Otherwise you could always move your private conversations to MSN, Gtalk, Facebook etc. Personally there are many more features that I think Mylot could implement that would actually enhance the user experience with this type of site. For example, I find the interests really difficult to manage in a timely and user friendly manner - something that I think would be much better to fix instead of implementing yet another poorly functioning integrated IM.

It would be pointless having discussions here if this was implemented as in a way we are already chatting but everyone can chip in with their comments; plus you can already tell if someone is online by seeing when they last logged on or from activity; it would be another way for people to spam so no thanks

I don't think it does, i think its fine as it is, having a chat messenger would negify the point of opening discussion to everybody. Maybe a chat room, but not a messenger. Hmm.. "Paid per line you speak" 0.001 pence each line. An idea?