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British software vendor Sazneo has launched a version of their chat software that you can now embed in any Web service or application. We last wrote about Sazneo about a year ago. "Sazneo Embed is ideal for companies that love the idea but are reluctant to introduce a new application onto busy desktops that already have email, instant messaging or social media tools." said Brett Davis, CEO. "Many of our clients have already started putting Sazneo into their internal applications and a number of SaaS businesses are now embedding it into their own products to offer a group messaging capability to their clients."

Friday night, New-Year's-Eve Eve, I had just stepped away from my blogging station when Yobongo CEO Caleb Elston recommended I open the app. That's interesting, I thought to myself. I never had to download an update. I've been watching Yobongo since it launched. It has only been open in Austin, New York and San Francisco since its debut, but I've kept my version updated, anyway. When it launched in my area, I didn't want to miss it.

So when I opened Yobongo on Friday, my first thought was, There must be a Web app in here somewhere. My second thought was, Oh, wow! Global Yobongo chat and private rooms are open to everyone! So that's the news. You can now use Yobongo no matter where you are, although the location-specific rooms are still only in select cities. But there's more. As Caleb told me coyly, "iPhone is just the start" for Yobongo. "We want to help people communicate more efficiently," Elston says, and that means everybody.

Google+ circles have been rolled into chat across all Google sites, including Gmail, iGoogle, Orkut, the Google Talk client, and even third-party apps. Previously, Google Chat was based on email addresses and was a part of Gmail. When Google+ launched, it had the same email-based chat widget that Gmail has. Now, anyone in your circles who has circled you back will appear in chat.

The chat list still shows your most recent contacts, rather than your full list, and you can use the search box to find people who don't appear. According to Google+ support documents, the chat relationships you had before this update are preserved and take priority. For example, your existing block list still applies. The order of contacts might appear differently in different places, but this Google+-enabled chat now applies across the board.

Grove, a new hosted IRC chat service for teams, launches today. It's IRC without the fuss, providing hosting, account management, access controls and fully searchable chat logging, as well as a sparkling new Web chat client.

It supports all the great IRC client apps, of course, but Grove takes care of the fiddly parts of setup and hosting. All that's left for teams to do is sign up and start using it. Starting today they can do so for free at Grove.io.

Since its launch at South By Southwest Interactive this year, Yobongo has been a quiet startup. It hasn't made best-thing-since-sliced-bread pronouncements or it's-the-x-of-y elevator pitches; it has just quietly kept working on its simple promise to, in the words of co-founder David Kasper, "help people communicate with new people around them." It's a promise that sounds overly simple until you see what Yobongo does. And today, the location-aware chat service for the iPhone has announced an update worth a thousand words.

Yobongo users can now add photos to the conversation. The app creates mobile chat rooms based on location, allowing users to chat with real people nearby, even people whom they've never met before. With Yobongo 1.4, they can now snap (or upload) a picture of where they are, and it will be instantly uploaded into the chat room. With messaging and photo sharing services rolling out from every major player, these features seem to strike at the heart of the iPhone's functionality. But Yobongo stands out from this crowd, because its purpose is to help people meet and discover each other. "We started Yobongo to help people make new connections and communicate more efficiently," says CEO Caleb Elston. "Now we are going to help people communicate even more emotion."

Twitter has no doubt changed how we think about real-time messaging. Twitter has given users a new platform upon which to "chat" - through posting messages, through targeted, but public @-messages and through private DMs. But "chat" doesn't quite describe what people do on Twitter. And no doubt, Twitter doesn't quite work seamlessly as a traditional chat client.

There's the character limitation, of course. There're the restrictions on DMing those who don't follow you. And if you have email notifications set up, there's the annoying influx in your inbox when you try to hold a conversation via direct message.

A new service launching today aims to leverage your Twitter network in order to build a better instant messaging platform. Joint lets you chat with those in your Twitter network - but it doesn't use Twitter to do so.

With SXSW well under way in Austin, Texas, the servers behind apps like Beluga, GroupMe, Kik and FastSociety must be working overtime. After all, people like talking to their friends, right?

In this same batch of apps, we've seen another phenomenon, though - apps that make it quicker an easier to talk to people you don't know - and we have one big question: Do people really want to talk to strangers?

Last fall, when Kik Messenger launched for iOS, Android and Blackberry, I quickly urged my friends to download the app and quit costing me an arm and a leg in SMS fees. The Kik honeymoon lasted but a short while, however. Soon enough, I was in love again, but this time it was all about spreading the love - Beluga had come along and shown me the ways of free, SMS-style messaging with groups of friends.

Today, Kik has come a-calling again, trying to woo lost lovers like myself with the feature we've all been talking about - group messaging.

With the South By Southwest Interactive festival just a couple weeks out, everyone is asking "What will be the big app this year at 'South By?'" One genre we've all been looking at this year is group communication. Apps like Beluga, GroupMe and Fast Society are getting a good bit of pre-conference clamor for their utility when trying to coordinate with multiple people.

Another app, called Yobongo, is getting some attention too, but not because it will make communication with folks you know easier, but because it will help you with communicating with folks you don't know who are nearby. All of it, however, hinges on one key, yet-to-be introduced ingredient - Yobongo's special sauce of location and "ambient real-time communication."

Hotmail may have three times as many users as Twitter, but it's looking for something that may not be as easily quantifiable - the cool factor of  Google's Gmail. That's something that Microsoft has been working on for a while now, with a full redesign of its email client last year.

Today, the company announced that it's adding another bit of cool to its 350 million member email system - full chatting capabilities with Facebook's 600 million member network worldwide.