Chat software also is easy to learn and leverages the one-on-one chatting style made popular with IM software from AOL, MSN, and Yahoo; it's a natural extension of such tools. For staffers who grew up in an IM universe during their teens and college years, it's an easy transition and a natural means of communication. Its real-time nature means that questions get answered quickly and without a lot of the back-and-forth typical in the e-mail universe, and it facilitates multitasking.
"With online chats and IM, a call center can handle multiple calls simultaneously, versus a single phone call," said Arsenio Batoy, president of Optical Laser, a distributor of storage, content management, message management, and security products.
An additional case for boarding the group-chat wagon stems from the availability of a growing core of chat-savvy developers. They're building chat-based applications using a variety of open-source tools and well-documented sets of protocols. Those developers are constructing sophisticated systems, which include full-blown chat systems from Parlano, Jabber, Antepo, Jive Software, Reuters, Userplane, and others.
Take Userplane, which earlier this year was purchased by AOL. It sells private Web-based IM solutions for online communities. Its chat engines are found everywhere from dating sites to social networking sites, such as Jlove.com and MySpace.com.
"We can help generate more customer loyalty, and generate more page views, with our tools," said Michael Jones, the CEO and one of the founders of Userplane. (Meebo is another example of a company that can add chat to Web pages.)
It helps that chat is at the center of a series of interoperability and standards movements, which makes it easier to build more advanced applications for it, as well. Those revolve around software using the protocol called the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. XMPP is the formalization of the core protocols created by the Jabber open-source community in 1999.
Jeremie Miller developed the original Jabber server back in 1998. Now the project has reached critical mass. Notable is the wide number of different server and client formulations that support XMPP. Jabber.com sells a commercial license, along with a combination of General Public License-based licensed servers and other commercial versions. The project has supported the efforts of dozens of different client implementations. Last year, support reached a new milestone with Google Talk and the Gizmo Project using those protocols.
