Our friends at 37signals just launched Campfire, their latest product (following on Basecamp and Backpack). I’ve been testing this product with them and think it’s a great one — a fantastic tool for distributed teams (which is perhaps not surprising since they used to be an international company). Campfire is a tool for company or project chat rooms, with a lot of the add-ons businesses would like (SSL, access control, searchable/archived conversations, file upload, and so on). The way they’ve built it reminds me of the Rife persistent IRC log used by the Groovy open source project, which I found incredibly useful while I was following Groovy a while ago.
One of my projects — covering three time zones — has already adopted Campfire and we’re expecting it to be very helpful. Worth checking out.