There is an old document about the rather abstract strengths of PSYC placed at http://www.psyc.eu/intro.en.html and http://www.psyc.eu/pros.de.html respectively, but users are suggesting something should point them to the simplest features that power users like us have long gotten used to.

No, that's not us. Just some nice chaps that tagged their film "psyc." They must have been intending us, though. It's evident.

More Strengths of PSYC

• Message Storage! you can leave a message for somebody no matter if the person is instantly available or not (it's amazing how many chat technologies do not provide this function!)

• Not centralistic, you can have your own server and be the boss, without any disadvantages.

• No limit on how many friends you have. And should you one day have many many we promise PSYC will be able to handle them all.

• The /shout command (or equivalent function of a graphical client) allows you to send a message to all of your friends (friendcast). No spam, no intrusion, no abuse. It is a useful function to keep in touch with things happening in your friends' lives. It's a bit like microblogging, only /shout came first.

• Some places provide a discussion history when you join them. Yet another example of why intelligent, programmable chatrooms are the way to go. And creating them is fun!  :)

• Stop consuming bandwidth with RSS readers. Subscribe the news you want using /subscribe spiegel or whatever else, then enjoy how thanks to multicast receiving news in realtime in PSYC hardly causes any traffic to anybody. Here's the list of public newsfeeds. Some are fed via RSS, some others via the Twitter gateway.

• Automations like psycmail, wikinotify, syslog2psyc, cvs2psyc or newsfeeds are fully integrated (not hotplugged through bots that need to be administered, if your chat technology even allows bots).

• The protocol syntax is just so much smarter and more useful than others, just look at psyctext or the builtin state capability. You don't want to still use a syntax like IRC, that depends on the order of arguments of a message code, or XML with all the problems described on the XML page.

• Network reliability is pretty good.

See also

You may want to look at details ordered by protocol features, or you may want to look into them by the degree of readiness, that means how concretely available they are.