thanks for the responses. i put up a long one 2x earlier but the site was all jacked up. in short i think ringcental has more corporate type options than GC, i haven't been psyched with 37 signals stuff (although it looks sweet!) but will check out campfire as well as theplanet (and lots of people psyched on slicehost - i'll check that too).
I like Campfire a lot, because it's simple and gets the job done. I can't recommend Basecamp and other 37Signals products, because they've just never been right for me and I don't have enough experience with them. ThePlanet, on the other hand, has been my dedicated server host since 2004 and has always been superb.
I'll vouch for Campfire also. It's relatively easy to hook notifications into it so that commits, test failures, and bug reports show up. In my last two companies we've ended up with then dynamic of "if it doesn't notify campfire, it didn't happen."
I use Highrise also for CRM. If it's just one or two of you then it's probably the only CRM out there that's simple enough to get into your workflow. If you're managing a salesforce then you probably want something different. But for just remembering who my clients are and when I need to contact them, it's amazing.
