Personally I have the sound and notifications off and don’t mind the chatting at all, but that also means I ignore the chat while working. I think chatting for introduction and about goals, expectations is crucial and should be limited only if it becomes about non-productive-related stuff.
Perhaps a second room with more or less chat (or other guidelines) will be good if more people join in, but now I think focus should be more on coming up with correct guidelines.
I have made a small start towards this—I urge you guys to find a better alternative, but until then I invite you to:
This open chatroom
EDIT: Login as guest to avoid spam in your twitter/facebook (credit Zian). I also recommend using some sort of adblock-program (sometimes the advertisements are with sound).
Regarding the popularity, there seems to be activity at least two thirds of the time, ranging to up to 10 people during “peak” hours.