Ephemeral messaging sounds cool, you should plug that somewhere on your site. Standing out will be good for business.

My initial concern is connection stability issues. What happens if the client's connection drops out for a period of time? Do clients have to explicitly leave the channel?

My team was estimating a story recently which could have used this, but we didn't want to spend the time and effort to build a whole infrastructure for one message. This would have been perfect! If I find some time, I'll give it a try and send you my feedback.