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IRC is dead, long live IRC

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Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#11

Post by kybernetyk »

andypants wrote: post #8

I work at google campus in london, an office for startups. Many weeks ago, somebody suggested on our yammer (business social network) that we should set up an irc channel for the people who work here. The general response was along the lines of 'that still exists?', 'hey, I heard windows 3.0 is being released', etc. Shame, because I find irc to still be the best chat I've ever used. Their response was also weird, sin…

Today's new tech startups are run by people who missed the time window when IRC was popular. They grew up with web based chats and instant messengers.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#12

Post by chadillac83 »

andypants wrote: post #8

I work at google campus in london, an office for startups. Many weeks ago, somebody suggested on our yammer (business social network) that we should set up an irc channel for the people who work here. The general response was along the lines of 'that still exists?', 'hey, I heard windows 3.0 is being released', etc. Shame, because I find irc to still be the best chat I've ever used. Their response was also weird, sin…

My company is much smaller than Google but still rather large and almost 100% IT focused. We jokingly setup an internal VPN accessible IRC server a couple years ago to share links and just have a development/sysadmin chat room. As we started using it more we started setting up specific channels for departments like #dev, #ops, #random, #dba. Now we use it for quick communications between departments, trading links, sharing articles from online, discussing technologies in an open forum, discussing infrastructure changes or proposing changes. etc. We recently have actually configured various systems like IDS, syslog, etc. to also dump to dedicated channels and use it as a throw away log dumping medium. Want to keep an eye on the db logs? #dblogs want to see how the live web cluster is doing #weblogs want to see IDS reports in real time #idslogs.

What started as a joke has actually become a staple of company wide team communication and systems monitoring... plus I get to slap coworkers with trouts.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#13

Post by zalew »

kybernetyk wrote: post #11
andypants wrote: post #8

I work at google campus in london, an office for startups. Many weeks ago, somebody suggested on our yammer (business social network) that we should set up an irc channel for the people who work here. The general response was along the lines of 'that still exists?', 'hey, I heard windows 3.0 is being released', etc. Shame, because I find irc to still be the best chat I've ever used. Their response was also weird, sin…

Today's new tech startups are run by people who missed the time window when IRC was popular. They grew up with web based chats and instant messengers.

yep. for some context:

One of the first times Zuckerberg and I (Mark Andreessen) got together, in 2005 or 2006, he stopped me in the middle of conversation and asked: “What did Netscape do?”

http://www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_andreessen/all/1

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#14

Post by meaty »

This is quite interesting. Citing the reasons of the decline of IRC makes it a more attractive prospect if you ask me now. Time to dig out irssi again :)

I was a user of IRC around 1998-2002 (I was a quakenet op) but I got lazy and bored of the politics and switched to MSN messenger which was vastly more popular as well.

The fundamental simplicity of IRC always rocked.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#15

Post by lucian1900 »

kybernetyk wrote: post #10
lucian1900 wrote: post #9

It's such a terrible protocol and a pain in the ass all the time. Sadly, there is no other wide-spread protocol with good multi-user chat clients. XMPP might be the best replacement, but there are almost no dedicated multi-user chat clients and irc networks (like freenode) would have to join the two protocols during the transition.

He, for me it's the other way: I like IRC because it's very simplistic. But when I have to do something with XMPP on the protocol level I just want to stab my eyes out because it's a bloated pile of XML. Maybe it depends on tooling. If you have a language that is married with XML - like Java - you probably will have no problems with XMPP. But if you're doing stuff with C you will love the simple structure of IRC.

IRC is extremely idiosyncratic, though. XMPP is much more logical and consistent. Any decent language can deal with trees, although XML is sometimes a little annoying.

The potential problem with XML is the overhead. I'm not sure that's been an issue so far, though.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#16

Post by patrickod »

IRC was, at least for me, one of the main reasons that I pursued tech and started programming at a young age. A friend of mine introduced me to a local Irish group of Linux enthusiasts/sysadmins/engineers who put up with my foolish questions long enough for me to learn something. While some channels are very quiet now I still find it one of the best resources when I'm troubleshooting a problem.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#17

Post by plasma »

I used IRC for 7 years at my old job, even in an office.

At my new startup we're using www.hipchat.com which is a pretty good replacement (simpler, no IRC server to setup), and its cheap.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#18

Post by jeffool »

andypants wrote: post #8

I work at google campus in london, an office for startups. Many weeks ago, somebody suggested on our yammer (business social network) that we should set up an irc channel for the people who work here. The general response was along the lines of 'that still exists?', 'hey, I heard windows 3.0 is being released', etc. Shame, because I find irc to still be the best chat I've ever used. Their response was also weird, sin…

I don't know about know, but I remember being told as recently as a couple of years ago that id Software used it as an inter-office chat tool. I certainly have imagined its use at jobs before, even when I worked in call centers. It couldn't be hard to let the rank and file chat when not on a call. (Yes, they were oddly draconian about doing nothing, or reading a book, between calls. Forget your book and your day is ruined.)

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#19

Post by andypants »

chadillac83 wrote: post #12
andypants wrote: post #8

I work at google campus in london, an office for startups. Many weeks ago, somebody suggested on our yammer (business social network) that we should set up an irc channel for the people who work here. The general response was along the lines of 'that still exists?', 'hey, I heard windows 3.0 is being released', etc. Shame, because I find irc to still be the best chat I've ever used. Their response was also weird, sin…

My company is much smaller than Google but still rather large and almost 100% IT focused. We jokingly setup an internal VPN accessible IRC server a couple years ago to share links and just have a development/sysadmin chat room. As we started using it more we started setting up specific channels for departments like #dev, #ops, #random, #dba. Now we use it for quick communications between departments, trading links, s…

That sounds like such an awesome setup!
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