Personal experience here: Convore rocks. Take it from a long-time IRC junkie. Dump Skype/IM for all your project-related chats and try using them and you quickly will see why Convore works and works well.
I remember Chatterous trying a similar play but can't recall what happened to them. Maybe the GUI wasn't so slick or maybe they pivoted into something we're unaware of...
Chatterous's Google Talk integration was so stellar (it's broken most the time now) that our teams used it exclusively for cross-team chat for the past few years. I was one of their biggest fans but now I know they're not giving it much attention anymore.
Given that, I really want to see convore integration with jabber/gtalk somehow, but I'm not sure how it would work for rooms+topics versus just rooms.
I remember Chatterous trying a similar play but can't recall what happened to them. Maybe the GUI wasn't so slick or maybe they pivoted into something we're unaware of...