Two new chat services are launching this week: Geesee and Plugoo. The former allows you to embed a chatroom for visitors to your blog or website, while the latter is more like MeeboMe, a widget from the makers of Meebo that lets you use your existing IM usernames on a web widget.
An interesting addition that Geesee offers is the ability to connect together all the sites using the widget: you can browse all the chatrooms on the service and find related rooms by tag. You could hop, for instance, from a chat about Facebook on Mashable to a related chat about social networking on another site. You can also find the most active chat rooms on the service. How will they fund all this? The plan is to put ads in the widgets themselves, which may or may not work out: they will, however, share ad revenue with the sites hosting the widget. In short, you'll get a free chat service for your visitors plus a small amount of income from the ads. Users don't need to find chats via a widget, however: they can also go direct to Geesee.com.
Geesee joins a host of similar services for cross-site chat, including 3Bubbles, Gabbly, Itzle, InCircles and a bunch of others I've probably forgotten about. Geesee is probably on a par with those, and offers more freedom when it comes to finding chats hosted on other sites. If it has a drawback, it's that the widget is too darned big: with a minimum size of 470px by 460px, you'll never fit it into your blog sidebar.
The chat-widget space is becoming so crowded that I'm quickly losing track of the differences between the various services. The one that stands out is MeeboMe, which is drop-dead simple and already has more than 2000 widgets on MySpace, according to Mashable Labs. The others, meanwhile, have zero mainstream adoption. Meanwhile, Stickam, Frappr and others offer widget-based chat as an addition to existing services. But the web-based chat space that Meebo occupies is also crowded, with eBuddy (formerly e-Messenger), KoolIM and Mabber all jostling for position. Those web-based messengers that don't have widgets will probably add them soon, thus making the choices even more bamboozling.
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