Third Place Chat Beta Preview

Remember that third place concept I brought up a few months ago?

We're ready to give community insiders a chance to check out what Stack Overflow Valued Associates #00006 and #00007 have been working so hard on.

For the next 3 days, we'll be running a public beta sneak preview of our proposed "third place" for all new (and existing) Stack Exchange network sites. Let's take the Food and Cooking site proposal -- which is currently in private beta -- as an example. On the very first day of the private and public betas, we'd have:

     cooking.stackexchange.com
<font color="maroon">meta</font>.cooking.stackexchange.com
<font color="maroon">chat</font>.cooking.stackexchange.com

Because you not only need a place to have intelligent Q&A; about bacon, you need a place to talk about the place, and a less formal "third place" to collaborate in real time with the fellow members of your community.

We already have the per-site metas, which work great, but we don't quite have that third place ready yet. But we'd like to ... soon. That's where you come in.

1. You must have a Meta Stack Overflow account with at least 20 reputation.
2. Make sure you're first logged in to meta, because we use a shared cookie for authentication.
3. Hop on over to chat.meta.stackoverflow.com and enter the password "gossipville".

Have fun -- and be sure to leave your feedback for us either on meta in a question tagged [chat], or in the chat itself in the appropriately named "Chat Feedback" room.

Update: beta preview complete! thanks for all your feedback.