I (currently) have the ChatterBox Sidebar up as a full window, with some slight CSS modifications to resize/color/hide/move some pieces. This serves me reasonably well, as I just push it to the background if I need the mental or screen bandwidth.
In a past life, I used an emacs-based MOO reader, where a LambdaMOO instance was used as a project-based chatroom. I have been mulling (for quite a while) a project to incorporate this into my emacs environment. This could be implemented as an IRC client window with a couple PM CB niceties added, or as an http client performing the same.