Ask YC: Recommendation on a chat service/software

We've used both LivePerson and LiveResponse (http://www.kayako.com). We preferred LiveResponse as it is incorporated with their help desk software which is fairly robust. Both were easy to use and install though. If you are looking for something simple then I would recommend LivePerson.

We have a public chatroom in our campfire account that we use for this purpose.

Also, I heard that you can now embed gTalk widgets in webpages, allowing gTalk to be used for that purpose. I don't know the details or if that's true at all.

We have the needed software stack at ProcessOne: http://www.process-one.net/

Contact us if you are interested.

You could place a Java applet on your website which connects to an IRC server, such as pirc.