Geekbot worked good when people put thought into their reports, which was far from always - a lot of the time it'd be "yesterday: wrote code. today: will write code. blockers: everything is awful" which isn't hugely helpful for team synchronisation. That said, it was a lot better than when we tried using hangouts. With Hangouts we kept running into issues like: not socially acceptable for video conferences at desks in the SF office, and the SF people being in a conference room felt a lot more distant than the remotes on their PCs.
Current team is also distributed (same timezones as previous), but we do a highly structured standup in video conference where everyone is on equal footing signed on a workstation (instead of half being in a conf room).