Well since this was brought to my attention as possible solutions to helping with the meter glitches, load times, and overall performance of the server bandwidth as a whole by another member of wgt and i concur with the possibilities.. here's a couple things that could help out...
1. Allow users to completely turn off the in-game friends list - this would in turn keep your computer and the server from having to communicate unnecessary data transmissions during gameplay that eat up bandwidth.
2. in concurrence with the first suggestion, allow users to completely turn off in-game invites - this would in turn have the same desired effect.
3. Also in relation to 1 and 2.. allow them to turn off in game chat...
And by turn off i mean it disables it and it either completely disappears or just stops all data transmission of this function...
I know by doing this if the user still has the main window open all of these things are still running but if the user decides to close the main window and only have the game browser open then all transmissions would cease for these functions.
And on a side-note suggestion.. have a hover option on the main window and in-game window (for those who choose not to turn off the in-game friendslist) set so that when you hover over a friend it gives you an option to send that person a message or remove that friend from the list.. this is more of a luxury suggestion so that you dont have to navigate to the user page and do it from there only adding more data to your system cache.