OK, this is really cool, even though probably no one's using it much. Kim Reist, CMP, events/logistics manager, Office of Conference Management at the Texas Medical Association recently clued me in to Peekko.com, which opens up an irc chat channel on any Web page you visit, so you can chat with others who are reading the same stuff you are. You have to have the latest version of Firefox (works with OSX—yay!), and there have to be other people who also have the latest version of Firefox and have downloaded Peekko's extension for it to work, unless you really enjoy talking to yourself.
While I couldn't immediately think of a meetings-related application for this, Kim could. She suggested that a meeting organizer could use it to help people connect when they visit the conference's Web site. "Meeting staff might park someone online as a guide or online help person for the meeting. Also, brower-based chat clients could really be a nice additional feature for online learning or web-only based conferences--I know that some but not all online platforms offer chat," she added.
Well, if anyone's interested in playing with this toy, I'd love to have a chat over here at face2face. Drop me an e-mail or leave a comment below if you have/are going to download this extension and want to play. There are probably so few of us (maybe just Kim and I?) that we'd have to set up a time to chat here because otherwise you'd end up like me, talking to myself again (I just tried it here, and I'm the only person on the chat at the moment).