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.

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

Your shared history vanishes when you're off the network though. Skype has channels, and preserves history, syncing your "rooms" when you log back in.

If it were as easy to pipe machine data (syslog, notices, tweets?) into Skype as it is to pipe it into IRC, it'd be perfect.

Plus with IRC you have the assurance that it will never go away. Worse case scenario is you just write your own server and do it yourself. There is no RFC for skype though.

when I disconnect, it automatically sets me /away, and renames my nick to e1ven_zz to make it clear to the rest of the team I'm away.. When I log back in, it renames me back to e1ven, and streams everything I missed.

The Air app for desktop can sometimes have performance issues for no particular reason. They're about to release a native OS X app though so that should solve this for a large amount of users.

The android application in woeful. It consistently logs me out and forgets my password which means that it's totally unusable for out of office notifications from people. I've had to rely more on their email notifications for unread personal messages than their Android app. It's a real shame because I could see myself getting a lot more use out of Hipchat if it worked well enough.

The best way to access hipchat that I've seen so far was just a jabber client - xmpp seems to be the backend of their service.

And my coworkers really love the web client. And some use xmpp. Many of us regularly use the iOS app. I guess that's one of the strength's of hipchat, the variety of access methods that all feel basically first-class. (and one person on our team even uses the SMS integration.)

In the case of links, a little bit of Python and the phenny framework let me write a bot that scraped links and post them to a private Twitter feed. That's a lot more flexible than a wiki for my purposes.

I agree with you. I recently worked with a lovely tech agency who used IRC for a lot of communication amongst their office and remote-based workers. Typically, each project had its own chat room, and we'd create private chat rooms as required if only a couple of us needed to discuss something.

I was really surprised with how well the system worked - and how easy it was to use! It'd probably been a decade or more since I'd used IRC, and it was a really pleasant rediscovery.

In short: I'll be recommending its use in future.

The people who go "into tech" during college because they saw Mark Zuckerberg making dumptrucks full of money probably don't know what IRC is, but the people who had to get into IRC chats to figure out how to make linux work on our hardware (like me, and most of my peers) absolutely grew up with IRC.

I grew up having friends that I met solely on IRC, and having it be a staple of the way that I communicated with certain groups of people; it's the same story with most of the people I hang out with.

I've taken to using private Skype rooms a lot (which is an underutilized resource and, incidentally, can be monetized for niche markets)

I'm only turning 27 this year, and I really can't wrap my head around people using things like vendor-specific IM or web-based chat rooms as a replacement for IRC in similar scenarios.

I know it's basically the same thing; a centralised gathering point tied to a server run by a particular company or organisation, but, I don't know...IRC just feels like a more 'transparent', neutral form/protocol to me.

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

I have a hard time believing that. Zuckerberg is 6 months younger than me, and I remember Netscape clearly (the end/later part of it anyway).

Perhaps he was too busy putting his head down, pumping out a real product instead of procrastinating and focusing on the past :)

So I could definitely see myself posing that exact same question to Marc Andreessen.

For scale, Rails was released in June 2004, four months after Facebook's launch.

http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

He's asking what netscape the group, as in the people building the software did, not what the software did.

I work at Google Dublin, and we consider IRC to be an invaluable business tool. There really isn't a replacement for it.

Even tho I still use IRC at home we use hipchat at work, and it works pretty well. The ability to easily send screengrabs and similar stuff to other users is pretty handy.

I don't get you people. I really don't get you.

sure if you enjoy proprietary walled gardens with uptime issues

1) It proved to be a pain supporting the non-techies using IRC

2) Nobody wanted to maintain the IRC server and set up logging. (And, if you add up the couple hours to do so and maintain it in a year, hipchat ends up being a good deal)

3) Some of our people use the SMS and xmpp integration, which makes it easily fit into their existing communications.

4) The API, web based search, gui admin, github integration, unfuddle integration, etc are already setup and/or written (an extension of #2)

5) Nice handling of large chunks of pasted text. (The web and desktop clients format them in fixed width properly and limit the size but provide and expand link.) This is more convenient than pasting a pastebin link, and works better than irc because of line breaks.

I mean, basic economics as well. If someone spends an hour a year maintaining the IRC server, helping non-tech people get onto IRC, etc, then paying for hipchat instead, for 4-8 people is well worth it each year.

(This is all after having used a channel on a public irc server, then someone set up IRC on a vps, then we used grove , and ended up on hipchat for the past year.)

For me, that trumps all your points. It seems that for you, it doesn't. The world's a crazy place.

I mean. If that's truly a concern, it seems like you need to own and configure your own physical hardware and require VPN access to all of them. For us/me, the cost and inconvenience isn't worth it, considering the basically valueless data to an outsider.

That's not to say that everyone decision matrix is the same or should be... As you mention.

Any idea of something like Hipchat but hostable internally?

This one looks like a carbon copy of hipchat, but I have no experience with it: http://kikuchat.com/

The only complaint about IRC that I've heard in the past was SSL, however we added SSL to the connection without problems.

Actually making it an explicit task to invite the right people to discuss when you need a group chat can be a feature in itself.

Now I love IRC, but for private use only.

They were sitting in the Netherlands and had hired a bunch of teleworkers. Mostly from Germany and Poland.

And whenever there were meetings (even with the bosses) we used IRC for that. It was pretty cool. You were also allowed to go AFK but you had to leave your client open to read the backlogs. (People knew beforehand if their active presence was required in the meeting.)

(I do like the class/instance structure, though, and that's never been duplicated anywhere else as far as I know. A friend and I made a plugin for irssi that allows you to use instances on IRC, but it never caught on.)

> The general response was along the lines of 'that still exists?', 'hey, I heard windows 3.0 is being released', etc.

Not shocked that a bunch of kids whose first experience with a computer was Windows XP and all trying to recreate facebook have never heard of IRC