As many as 10 people can be in the room at once. In addition to chatting amongst yourselves, you can maintain a private chat with just one person if you wish.
Pick a time a try it out. Obviously, at least two people need to be on in order for it to work. (chatting by yourself is a little dull).
You can only see what goes on while you're on. Once you log out, you can't log back in and see stuff that happened previously.
I'd suggest using the same name as you have here on the forum, but you can pick any name you want.
One thing I've found so far ... it works with Internet Explorer, but doesn't seem to work with Firefox. I don't know about Netscape or others. Let me know.
This IS pretty cool and useful. Send someone a message on the board to meet in the chat room--you can then talk about each other, the weather, your kids, the price of beer :) It IS a nice option to chat online here!