Hi,
I think that irc feed of recent changes is working great, but there is still a lot of space for improvement.
As Ryan Lane suggested once, we could probably use system of queues instead of irc which would be even more advanced. My suggestion is to create some kind of feed that would be in machine parseable format, like XML
This feed would be distributed by some kind of dispatcher living on some server, like feed.wikimedia.org and offering not just recent changes but also a recent history (for example last 5000 changes per project)
In case that service which is parsing this feed would be down for a moment, it could retrieve a backlog of changes.
The current feed irc.wikimedia.org should stay, but we could change it so that the current bot is retrieving the data from new xml feed instead of directly from apaches.