I wish you could make individual rooms for chat. Larger alliances are too cluttered if they are trying to use chat, so they still need another client where they can separate out conversations.
Also, I recommended this to Betsy on chat the day chat came out. There needs to be some sort of emote function. Right now, players get annoyed by the yellow message icon popping up and opening chat to only see a new player has joined or left. Half of the time I am on I spend more time maximizing and minimizing chat than playing (I don't want to miss anything you know!). If there were a way to send a special message that would pop up with say a red notification instead of the yellow, it would be easier to play the game and somewhat ignore the chat but still be on it. If a player comes into chat and wants to say "HEY I HAVE A COLONY SHIP IN MY CITY!", he can do it and it with something to catch they eye of all the trolls that are on chat but have it minimized.
I use it a lot, I am on nearly the whole time I play and our ocean uses it exclusively for running operations. For this reason however, other players do not use it because when we are talking about making sure to send an attack in the next 30 seconds, it doesn't pertain a player 60 hours away at all. It annoys them.