Web Worker Daily

Free (and alpha) service Chatterous offers web-based chatrooms to all comers. In that regard, they’re somewhat similar to Campfire, but there are notable differences. The key feature here is that chat is not strictly a web-based activity: you can communicate with Chatterous via web, email, IM (GTalk only at the moment) or SMS – as can everyone else in the chat. This means you can carry out a conversation with a bunch of people even if they don’t have any direct connections in common.

There are some limits here: you can only get Chatterous messages via one medium at a time (so if you’re getting emails you don’t get SMS), and though you can be a member of multiple chat groups, you only see messages from one at a time on the web site (and there’s no way to tell that another group has a new message without clicking over to it). But as a way to pull together people across different connections without excessive effort, it works brilliantly.