If you want to have the HN chatroom always at your side when browsing HN... go grab the GreaseMonkey HN toolkit, then copy paste this code at the end of the file, but inside the last IF clause. No warranties expressed or implied. :-)
Chatterous is really cool. I don't mind the blog layout, form follows function. What I do much mind is lack of a link to chatterous.com from the blog. So annoying.
It might just be me, but it disappoints me a bit to see startups put blogs as a sub-domain of WordPress.com. (WordPress itself is great, but it's much better to use a sub-domain or sub-folder of the primary domain -- for controlling the SEO).
So, I'd advise:
blog.chatterous.com or chatterous.com/blog
It's not that expensive to do (even if you want to host at WordPress.com). Should be standard practice for all YC startups.
The value of public embeddable chats, at least to me, is the ability to participate without having to sign in for anything. Meebome works extremely well for this.
A possible application to look into is integration with BlackBerry Messenger. It is very powerful and would seem more appropriate for a chat session than over SMS.
Yikes, Meebo Rooms is a UX disaster though. I tried using it on our 'maintenance page' once when we were upgrading our servers, and it was a visual design abortion.
Definitely psyched about using Chatterous in the future.