As we are working on the site to get it in shape, chat is proving quite popular.
It has been a bit of a struggle to get the chat going. We tried a Skype public room first but that didn't take on – too many steps from a website visit to starting a client and figuring out where the room is and so on.
The same problem would seem to affect all external chat clients whether Skype, IRC or something else. The chat is attractive if you can join it instantly while visiting the site... no extra installs or configurations, just being able to see people talking on the front page and pop in with a question or a hello.
So in that sense the current Flash based chat seems to work very well. The "lite" client on the front page gives instant access to the current discussion. The "full screen" version gives you a very rich (still in Flash) client interface with all the usual bells and whistles of a chat application.
The downside of it is that it is still Flash. Flash still doesn't "naturally" integrate with the rest of the page but is a browser extension and that creates its own set of problems. However, it is a compromise we have to live with for now. It would be great to have something like a GWT-based chat application (like what you get with Google Mail) but nothing really polished has come up yet.
In the meanwhile, we are making our chat logs available on this website so if you want to catch up on past discussions, you can read the raw discussion material. These are also indexed as part of the site search functionality so don't be surprised if on occasion your search ends up in the middle of a chat log.
Piece by piece and step by step we will get all this neat functionality worked out and integrated into the website to help the community collaborate and grow.
