A chat application is pretty much the canonical "Hello, world!" of socket programming. No wonder it is becoming the "Hello, world!" of web sockets too.

Normally, the progression is time-server, echo-server (with timestamps, sometimes), "selective echo server" (don't reply to sender, allow multiple recipients/subscribers) -- aka "chat".

What fun is message passing if you've got no one to pass messages to, or receive messages from? And when you're doing that, you have chat! :-)