By chat do you mean a one-on-one private chat? Because there's always the IRQ channel, don't ya know!
-Darwin
Ask Paul. It was his suggestion:
...and finally this is probably more complication than it's worth it but it would be great if you can mimic Tangler's real time forum chatting with forum posts so you can either directly get a preview of the forum contents without leaving chat or view chat posts on a forum post without going to the chatroom but it's not really beneficial, just something that might satisfy the twitter generation of forum users.
-Paul Keith