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Full disclosure: I built Candy

You could use Candy (http://candy-chat.github.com/candy) as a nice web UI for XMPP MUC (Multi-User-Chat). It supports basic features but is easily extendable through plugins.

Apologies for not being clear. We all already have and use Google Chat. Failing that there are XMPP clients on all the relevant desktop and mobile platforms.

The one thing that has the lowest utility is a web based interface to chat since it essentially doesn't work well in the background in the same way as an app like Pidgin does.

looks pretty cool - will check it out

Have you looked into Partychat[1]. It is what we use for internal communication. You can easily create multiple rooms and it integrates with gtalk.

[1]: http://partychapp.appspot.com/

That looks extremely close to what we wanted. It even looks like you can run it on your own appengine instance. Thanks for the pointer.

we plan on supporting XMMP soon...