Our “third place”, after a successful three day beta preview, is now on the final path to launch.

What is this mythical third place I speak of?

Because you not only need a place to have intelligent Q&A; about managing your finances, 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.

This is a permanent public beta, meaning chat is now live on one site in our network … forever. We plan to roll out out chat on more sites in about 4 weeks, assuming the public beta goes reasonably well. …

As promised, we are slowly rolling out the third place across our network.

We started with chat.meta.stackoverflow, and as previously announced on the Server Fault blog, we now have chat.serverfault.com.

You may remember we rolled out per-site metas across the entire Stack Exchange network, as well as for Server Fault and Super User, back in July. So from our perspective, we’re completing the experience:

chat.serverfault.com is still a public beta, but we’re rapidly closing in on release status. I expect we’ll begin a fairly aggressive rollout of chat across all sites within 4 w …

When people ask me what mistakes we made in building Stack Overflow, near the top of the list is not acknowledging the need for a meta-discussion site earlier. That is, a place for people to discuss Stack Overflow itself.

I resisted this for the longest time, relegating meta topics to UserVoice, because I didn’t see much value in meta-discussion. But then I finally bowed to community pressure and created meta.stackoverflow.com a little less than a year ago.

Owning our own meta, rather than outsourcing it, has been hugely productive in evolving the engine and the trilogy sites forward. The community was right, and I was so very, very wrong. …