Hubot is a chat bot, modeled after GitHub’s Campfire bot, hubot. He’s pretty cool. He’s extendable with community scripts and your own custom scripts, and can work on many different chat services. GitHub, Inc., wrote the first version of Hubot to automate our company chat room. Hubot knew how to deploy the site, automate a lot of tasks, and be a source of fun in the company. Eventually he grew to become a formidable force in GitHub.
Today’s version of Hubot is open source, written in CoffeeScript on Node.js, and easily deployed on platforms like Heroku. More importantly, Hubot is a standardized way to share scripts between everyone’s robots.
Requirements: Node.js
Demo: http://hubot.github.com/
License: MIT License
Discourse is the 100% open source, next-generation discussion platform. You should consider using Discourse when you need a mailing list, a forum to discuss something, and a chat room where you can type paragraphs.
Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to reimagine what a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform should be today. They tried to build the community that has a natural immune system to defend itself from trolls, bad actors, and spammers. There’s also a trust system, so engaged community members can assist in the governance of their community.
The act of participating in a discussion should fundamentally feel good in a way that it currently does not on all existing forums and mailing lists. It should be fun to have discussions with other human beings, not a chore, or something that’s barely tolerable.
Requirements: PostgreSQL 9.1+, Redis 2+
Demo: http://www.discourse.org/
License: GPL License
Kandan is an open source slick chat app for web developers. It is easy deploy to CloudFoundry, Heroku, dotCloud, etc. It supports Collaborative team chat, Unlimited channels, Embed formats for images and youtube videos with requests for others.
Requirements: –
Download Link: http://kandan.me/
License: AGPL License
Balloons.IO is a web multi-room chat server and client ready to use. It’s build with the help of node.JS, Express, Socket.IO and Redis. Balloons uses easy-OAuth for authentication with Twitter. The user interface looks pretty slick. It is released under MIT Licesne. You can install it on your own server for free easily.
Requirements: Node.js
Demo: https://github.com/gravityonmars/Balloons.IO
License: MIT License
Candy is a JavaScript-based multi-user chat client. There are plenty of web-based chat clients out there. Most of them are built to emulate your instant messenger. They offer you tons of settings. Candy is different. It’s built for your community.
Candy focused on real-time multi-user chatting. It is easy to configure, easy to run, easy to use. It is highly customizable and 100% well-documented. And it is used and approved in a productive environment with up to 400 concurrent users. It works with all major web browsers including IE7.
Requirements: Javascript Framework
Demo: http://candy-chat.github.com/candy/
License: MIT License
TicketMy’s Socialbar makes your website social, interactive and engaging by offering a range of social and engagement widgets, with lots of customization and embedding options. It includes more than 20 useful applications,  including a multi-IM chatting widget that rivals Meebo. It also provides extensive Facebook and twitter integration for websites to have increased stickiness, user traction and engagement.
You can also track the social sharing and engagement of the users with the provided social analytics. Best of all, TicketMy’s Socialbar is totally Free, served from Amazon’s CloudFront CDN and loads in less than 2 seconds.
TicketMy’s Socialbar can be added to a site by simply embedding a few lines in the HTML of the site in a matter of minutes. And it is very easy to add to any blogging or CMS platform, with drop-in plugins available for WordPress, Blogger, Joomla, Drupal, Movable type, Tumblr, Ning and etc.
Requirements: –
Demo: http://www.ticketmy.com/bumpin/socialbar/
License: Free
Anologue is an approach to ad hoc, linear dialogue in realtime. With anologue you can quickly and easily engage in an anonymous (or not) linear dialogue with any number of people (within reason). There is no accounts or installations required. Your “chat room” is created by the time this link loads.
Best of all: Anologue is open source. built with php 5.3.1, using the most non-heinous, totally rad lithium framework, couchdb, jquery, a few other scripts as well as some classy, original and established iconography for ui; all coming together for the conversational goodness you’re about to experience.
Requirements: PHP 5.3, CouchDB, rad-dev account
Demo: http://anologue.com/add
License: BSD License
Nurph puts Real-Time Chat on your website. ‘Nurph’ any URL by entering it in the URL Box, or by using the Bookmark, and Nurph puts a real-time chat on top of the page. There is no installation required. Just enter a URL, promote it and chat.
You can also promote your Nurph URL across the Web, email, Facebook and Twitter. For example, how about linking to Nurph on your Twitter profile? When people visit your Twitter profile, they can click your Bio URL, Login via Twitter, and join your virtual hangout to chat with you in real-time!
Nurph has just launched in public beta testing. You can start Nurphing right away but please note that the service may be subject to change.
Requirements: –
Demo: http://nur.ph/
License: License Free
This is Chat2, which is an update to original Chat Room published on CSS-Tricks. In some ways, the technology is the same. We employ PHP to talk to the server, jQuery to keep the chat rolling, and the chats themselves will be stored in .txt files just like the first version.
There are some new features in Chat2. Usernames are now unique to users currently chatting. You can see a “currently chatting” user list. And there are multiple rooms for chatting available now.
Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://css-tricks.com/examples/Chat2/
License: License Free
iJab is an Ajax-based web based instant messaging program for XMPP/Jabber. It is free software and users can run their own instant messaging without limitations or software cost, complimenting the XMPP philosophy of a distributed network. iJab is interpreted purely by the client webbrowser. It runs solely in a browser and does not require downloading or installation of additional software.
iJab also developed iJabBar, a Facebook styled web chat client. Do you need integrating IM into you website or hosting your own IM service? iJab might be suitable for you.
Requirements: –
Demo: http://www.ijab.im/demos/
License: GPL License
