I think a great way of helping the community grow and helping people grow is by adding the option to stream together on the same screen. By inviting a channel to stream with you on your channel, you, in turn, stream on their channel as well and you end up sharing viewership and growing together with your friends. A great way of doing it is by looking at the multistre.am website and going to layout 4, or by joining both chats together so that both you, and your partner can interact with the chat together without having the problem of each streamer talking to his own chat while being heard on the other's stream.
It also might help retain viewers for longer and the chat might end up interacting with the streamers more often.