I've been on a telecommuting project for the past several months or so. At some point we realized that we weren't really functioning as cohesively as possible,

I've been on a telecommuting project for the past several months or so. At some point we realized that we weren't really functioning as cohesively as possible, and the solution ended up being in finding a group chat tool. The author here uses Campfire, but we went with Hipchat (http://www.hipchat.com/ http://www.hipchat.com/). It certainly helped us with the sense of being isolated from the team. Now as to dealing with being in my apartment for what can be huge swaths of time...