I've just started writing it off as "Because startup!". There really are just some protocols that don't need to be reinvented as companies. Yeah, twitter is better than finger, but IRC has proven itself.

>twitter is better than finger

sure if you enjoy proprietary walled gardens with uptime issues

I mean, I can give you the reasons that I have a hipchat account which I use with my coworkers, even though a good 50% of us are also on IRC for other purposes.

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.)

When you host your chat on somebody else's service, you don't have privacy (or confidentiality).

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

Yeah. We use google apps, dropbox, unfuddle, GitHub, hipchat, Linode and amazon. Basically, we're pretty comfortable trusting our business with these companies. We're not in a space where we have secrets that really would give someone a competitive advantage. A few things like security credentials are shared offline or in a truecrypt volume.

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.

I assume you also don't get people who use proprietary, hosted services to host (Github) and run (Heroku) their code, manage their projects (Jira), email (Sendgrid), forums (vBulletin), helpdesk (Zendesk) and a whole lot more.