Implementing chat in an application?

Question

I'm making a game and I am using Python for the server side.

It would be fairly trivial to implement chat myself using Python - that's not my question.
My question is
I was just wondering if there were any pre-made chat servers or some kind of service that I would be able to implement inside of my game instead of rolling my own chat server?
Maybe like a different process I could run next to my game server process?

Answer 1

I recommend using XMPP/Jabber. There are a lot of libraries for clients and servers in different languages. It's free/open source.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP

Answer 2

Maybe you could use IRC as a chat service, I know of irclib for python, its more of a client but in theory you could use it to proxy an other IRC server from the game server.

Its a little hackish, just thought I'd mention it

Answer 3

Honestly, I think it'd be best for you to roll your own and get it tightly integrated with your program. I know there's no sense in reinventing the wheel, but there are several advantages to doing so in your case: integration, learning, security, and simplicity.