Yer, i like this idea. It would be really handy to know when various people are on without having to troll through the roster.
We need a bigger logical group than a squad, but smaller than a country. Call it what you will Friends, Alliance, etc etc kind of like a super-squad. Perhaps it could be formed by inviting squad COs to a group, so that we can have logical groupings of squads. Membership is not exclusive, so your squad can belong to any number of alliances or friend squad groups etc??
Then we could have a dedicated channel on the radio for all those in that grouping without having to establish it each time (like we do now).
This would be a huge bennefit for people who play in the 'off' hours who dont have enough members in their squads to be able to do real coordinated strikes etc, and would be more cohesive than just ad-hoc rallying over channel 2.