37signals have just launched a new product called Campfire. There is a chat room for all basecamp users that I’ve been having a look at just to get a feel for it.

The main benifit here over existing technology is to create a chat room that you can link to. The owner can create a chat room and then send a link or link of a webpage to it for guests to particapate in. So for example if you ran a community website you could easily create a chat room and link to it from your existing site. Personally I think this genius and I can think of hundreds of possible applications for it.

They however seem to be selling it more as a place where businesses can chat to clients. I really can’t see much use for this in reality but then again I’m sure people can point out situations were it would be useful.

It will be integrated into basecamp so that should be useful although i don’t think I’d pay extra for it at this point, I find it hard enough to get clients to use it instead of email.

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