To add to the discussion, I have recently gone through a system known as sakaiproject which is as far as i know is some sort of a web framework to create sites etc and it's code can provide some lead to construct a chat room etc; it also has video streaming feature etc. But Its written completely in java and if we decide to use some features we have to port it to django/python. Links : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakai_Project Links : http://sakaiproject.org/