This is what Ogrebears was telling me about yesterday:

launcher.station.sony.com/

He used his friends list (apparently I'm on it....) and was able to chat directly with me (He was out of game and I was in it).

It's.. very blue..

EQ1 had an IM client for a short period of time that was very cool. You could chat with anyone on your friends list in or out of game - it was like Yahoo, MSN, AIM, etc, only it would send you a tell if you were in game, or act like an IM client out of game.

You could also join custom chat channels (I don't think you could join a guild channel, or /occ, etc) and chat with everyone, not just individuals.

I hope this is the same thing, and I hope you don't have to have the game installed to be able to use it (ie, have it going at work - I can't play the game at work, but I could chat with people)

I was playing around with it last night. Not bad. One thing that would probably be of use for those of you who leave your computers running, I think I saw a setting to keep the game updated. In theory, when a patch came out, the new launcher would go grab it for you without you having to actively click on the launcher. Since the new one can be left running in the background, it would just go grab the patches as they come available. I told it to exit once I run a game but by default, the launcher will stay running after you've launched EQ2. Did have some cool features though.