PartyChat is not a plugin, nor a web application. It’s a simple chat bot for jabber which adds chatrooms into Google Talk. You’ll have to add partychat@gmail.com as your friend, and use simple commands to create a room or join an existing chatroom.
You can join a chatroom by sending an IM to partychat@gmail.com with the message “/enter chatroom_name”. Similarly, “/make chatroom_name” will create a room with the name chatroom_name. Optionally, Chatroom can be password protected using the syntax “/make chatroom_name password”. For help, IM “/help”.
I found PartyChat much more like an IRC channel than group chat. PartyChat is accessible from Gmail chat, desktop GTalk client or any other jabber compatible client, whereas Group Chat feature is only available on Google Talk gadget. The best part is that PartyChat is persistent across sessions, which means you won’t miss any of the conversation going in your room. Even if you log off without leaving the room, the chat will be saved in your Google Account (like how all other chat conversations are saved in Gmail).
PartyChat isn’t new; it has been running since December 2005 (just 4 months after GTalk was released). It was developed as an open source project by Google employee, Akshay Patil, but it is not affiliated with Google in any way. Google employees can use 20 percent of their time on their own personal projects, and Akshay certainly made the best out of it!
[Via: Google Operating System]
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