Sometimes you want to find someone to talk with online. It’s an odd hour of the day, or night, or people aren’t reachable and all you’re getting voice mail. And you don’t want a solicitation for an escape kind of thing. A genuine conversation.

Yes, there’s the random kind of chat, a la chatroulette. Doesn’t count as conversation.

Where can you find a live chat room with real people for real conversations any time?

There’s people on IRC all the time. One of the search engines for IRC chat rooms is http://searchirc.com/ and without needing to download and install an IRC client, there’s http://www.mibbit.com/ to access an IRC chat room through a web browser.

And there’s Talk City http://talkcity.com and http://www.everywherechat.com/

There are also chat rooms in those instant messaging networks, like http://chat.aim.com, Yahoo Messenger chat rooms,

Any others out there?

There are lots of free chat rooms and chat widgets. Most of them require you to sign up for an account and/or use Java. This is a list of easy setup, free chat rooms, with no registration required. Get a chat room to use instantly, or keep one around to use whenever you want an online meetup. These web apps let you setup a chat room and then invite people you want to chat with by sending them a web address / link.

http://www.babelwith.me - with multi-lingual instant translation, up to 45 languages. This means you can chat with non-English people instantly!

http://www.stinto.net - creates a free chat room with one click (actually it took me 4 clicks)

http://todaysmeet.com - setup a free chat room with ability to specify a duration and also a twitter hashtag

http://www.chatzy.com - With Chatzy you can create a chatroom and send out email invitations very quickly and easily. No registration is required.

http://www.disposablechat.com

http://www.neatchat.com

http://www.everywherechat.com - this one is powered by Adobe Flash, and allows you to join existing rooms too

http://gabbly.com - this one lets you add a chat window while browsing a website, pretty nifty; for example, chat about this website by using the link http://gabbly.com/daily.djchuang.com

on another note, for entirely random chats with strangers, there’s http://omegle.com and http://chatroulette.com