Hab.la allows site owners to chat with their visitors using the Jabber IM client or GTalk. It’s free, which is always attractive for startups. The tool allows continuous chat even when the user leaves the site and moves on somewhere else.

A handy little tool that might be disruptive in the current marketplace if they can beef up the functionality to support features like multiple chat operators, to appeal to larger e-commerce stores and the like who often have teams of chat operators. They might even consider allowing users to chat to other users browsing the same page and develop some powerful social bookmarking tools to create a kind of real time chat version of stumbleupon.