I closed the chat...
I just wacked the chat room - it was definitely not working like I had hoped. Surprisingly, people expect to be able to "chat" in a chat room! This makes sense, but I was thinking that because the chat was archived that in case I wasn't around, that people would either just leave messages or interact amongst themselves. That didn't happen.
And it was definitely a bit of a waste of time for me as well - not just the constant interruptions from chatters - it wouldn't have been bad if I had caught people all the time, but I'd see message alerts 10 minutes too late and by the time I logged in and checked, they were gone. So I decided to give up on it for now. Erik was spot on with this one. :-)
Something that looks interesting is Tangler's "live" forums, which is a sort of mid-way point between chat and a forum. And it's going to be embeddable on your site as well, which is great, so I can't wait for it to get out of beta so I can try it (and delete it after a few days... just kidding.).
My email address is still russ@russellbeattie.com if you want to say hi - I'm pretty horrible at responding to them, but feel free to tell me what's on your mind.
:-)
-Russ