It has sparse activity because it's being displayed on the front page only I believe. I often find myself checking it out & posting something, but then I don't check back for a while because I move on to forum topics.
On GTAS.de we used to have a wide chatbox in the site's layout footer, so it ALWAYS displayed on the bottom no matter where you were. The refresh intervals were also pretty quick (10 sec I think it was). That worked pretty good.