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