The hacker(news)? community did not need to wait for such a lousy webapp technology to have chat working. IRC is good enough, though a bit old. SILC is another improved version of IRC. XMPP+MUC is yet another good alternative and can serve as backend for stupid webapps.

All of them are using protocols designed for chatting and none of them use web technologies, even though you can write a JS client for each of them.

In the end, please use the right tool for the right job. If there was downvotes here, I'd definitely downvote that post.