We have a distributed team of 4 engineers in 3 different locations. We have been using lechat.im for the last month and it has improved the information flow dramatically. Before lechat.im we tried hangouts, Skype and gTalk and those all fall short of the features that matter for a distributed team. Things that I love about lechat: search, SVN and git hooks (checking go into a separate room as messages), notifications, chat history.