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IRC is dead, long live IRC

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Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#51

Post by merlincorey »

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…

At another small startup, I setup an IRC server when I was told they were using Bonjour before I got there. It started out very similarly for us -- just a place to chat with the other developers and ops people and share some links. Over time, several IRC bots were created doing real work for the company; most importantly while I was there, the deploy robot would cut a release from revision control for the particular project being deployed and deploy where it was told (or even revert to a previous release if necessary), only listening to people based on their umasks (everyone had their own hostnames with properly setup RDNS too, but that was another matter)... Worked quite well! Can't say if it still does, or not, as I am no longer there.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#53

Post by lucian1900 »

lmm wrote: post #26
lucian1900 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've heard it argued that the main reason Wave died was all the XML overhead from being built on XMPP.

I doubt that's it. More likely Wave died because they somehow neglected to actually release it. By the time they closed it down, very few people had gotten invites.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#55

Post by [deleted] »

duuude wrote: post #52

I stopped using IRC several years ago. There are so many features in a multi-person chat that's lagging behind. Jabbr ( http://www.jabbr.net ) is a good replacement for IRC, with features such as offline history, and embedded content (for code snippets, etc.)

[deleted]

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#58

Post by Symmetry »

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…

IRC is nice, but I still like Zephyr, the origonal IM system, better. Except for the little problem with NAT traversal...

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#59

Post by chipsy »

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…

I've determined independently that a IRC server fills a sweet spot in the collaborative toolset. A basic IM system isn't good enough because it doesn't have channels, it doesn't give you a shared history. Email is heavy and induces people to spend too much time per message.

Sometimes it's good to have a light/noisy feed, and IRC is just fine for that job.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#60

Post by chipsy »

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.

One protocol I've skimmed over is http://about.psyc.eu/ which claims to bridge IRC and XMPP, among numerous other things.

The claimed scope is so broad, though, that it's hard even to figure out a good starting point for further investigation.

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