[toddml]

A large number of New York City startups use something called PartyChat (hosted on AppEngine). It is maintained by some current/former NYC Googlers, and basically creates an IRC style chat interface over XMPP, allowing you to create fairly full featured chatrooms using your various Gtalk or XMPP accounts. It's easily extensible with commands and "hooks", so you can pipe code commits, deploy messages, alerts, and the like into the chatroom.

http://partychapp.appspot.com/

Also check out partychat-hooks for simple HTTP API integration. It was written by one of our engineers at bitly to ease some of the aforementioned integrations. http://partychat-hooks.appspot.com/

[sunsu]

Wow, this is an excellent tool. Can't believe I haven't heard about it before now.

[tombot]

This is awesome, love that it uses basic XMPP as the interface