Husky Chat, a new Chrome extension, turns any website into a chatroom by overlaying a simple, drop-down chat window over each page on the web.

Users logged in to Husky Chat are able to see other Husky Chat users on each site they visit — that is, if other users are on that site. As the application is relatively new, user counts are still low.

Built by New York-based startup Husky Laboratory, the extension quietly launched in the Chrome Web Store during mid-September and has relied solely on word of mouth to spread thus far.

Co-founders Eric Ho, formerly in digital partnerships at American Express, and Stanley Wong, previously an engineer at Sony, started working on Husky Chat full-time in June after a few months of kicking around ideas. Ho recalls:

“Late last year, we started toying around with differnet ideas. We tried something mobile. We tried games. We tried doing a mobile-based event app. And then we realized — all the ideas were around connecting people. We just really miss meeting people. You know, not in a shady way. Stanley always talks about meeting awesome music fans who recommended music back in IRC chatrooms — we want to bring that experience back.”

For those confused by the acronym “IRC,” don’t be. You’ve undoubtedly used a chatroom. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a protocol for real-time Internet chatting — think ICQ, AOL Chat Rooms, Google Chat. IRC was designed for group chatting but also enables private messaging. Husky Chat aims to bring back the past-time of chatting with random strangers.

Oh, the glory of the ’90s. Trying Husky Chat for the first time felt like jumping a Skip-It or unrolling a pack of Bubble Tape. And who doesn’t love the ’90s?

Though the design was slick and contemporary, the feeling of hopping into a chatroom and just seeing what’s up brought me back to the good old days as a pre-teen back in Arkansas, chatting up and getting to know all of these people that I’d never actually ever meet in person. There is something magical about that experience. Though, in today’s über-connected world, I found myself Googling chatters that I encountered. So, it’s a reinterpretation of the days of yore.

Co-founder Eric Ho chats with Hacker News readers on Husky Chat

The Husky Lab experience is a bit different from the glory days of AOL Chat in more than just one way, though. The most appealing advancement is the “Trending” feature, which features the most popular pages on Husky Chat at any given moment.

And in what may be a downside for some potential users, all chatters must log in using Twitter, Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn, and their full names are transparent in the system. Ho hopes that this measure will cut down on trolls and spam that become rampant in the IRC rooms of the past. But not all users are up for handing over that kind of data.

Husky Chat made a small splash in the Hacker News community on Monday after releasing a new feature called Lobby, which provides a place where everyone on Husky Chat can talk to one another, no matter where they are on the Internet. One of the oft-cited pieces of feedback was, unsurprisingly, that these tech-savvy users weren’t into using social login for a product they’ve never used. Ho and Wong, though, also received masses of feedback on other desired features, too. Users want gravatars, chat history, domain-level chatrooms, and notifications, among other goodies.

Ho has been busy compiling feedback during the past 24 hours and the co-founding duo is already planning implementation of some of these features, with priority given to the most requested feature: history. Currently when you leave a chatroom, all of the chat history is deleted. Ho and Wong had thought that the parallel to leaving a physical room would be well-received, but in this data-driven world, people want at least a little bit of history to remind them of what has been.

But features are the least of Ho’s worries. The big task now is finding users. This idea has been tried multiple times in the past, and so far no success stories have emerged. As a number of users noted on the Hacker News thread, Husky Chat’s success will probably be determined more by its marketing prowess than the technology behind the product. It’s actually a pretty slick experience already — it just needs to hit critical mass to be useful.

“Yeah, this makes sense with no users,” Ho jokes. “But maybe ‘A/S/L’ might just make a come back. You never know.”

Husky Chat’s distribution strategy focuses on getting the product into the hands of community managers interested in engaging their communities on-site. “Husky Chat is a little different from what came before,” says Ho. “We are going with a real-name approach, which should enhance the quality of the conversation, and we’re going to work hard on things like trending content, and working with community managers and site owners to create a good, robust tool that people will feel comfortable in handing over to their community.”