In game chat

When you play minecraft after a while you get bored of singleplayer,you gather some friends and move on to a server. Theres only one problem...Communication,it is hard and time consumming to talk in the chat,and for some people skype is laggy,buggy and slows down there computer ruining there gaming experance, I was think only if you could chat through minecraft! There could be a slash command for certain channels such as /channel 1.
People could make there own channels such as /david's chat etc. and mabe even have a password.
/david'schat dusty etc....Just my idea.