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Um. So basically, they just reinvented IRC, based it on an XMPP backend and spiced it up with a load of funky buzzwords?

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I don't get it. XMPP already has everything IRC has.

- Federation

- Multiple (persistent) rooms (Look up XMPP Groupchat)

- Permissions (think chanserv, /mode +ov etc.)

- Private messages

What am I missing? I'm hanging out on IRC every day, on multiple networks. No, I don't use XMPP groupchat so far - just to counter that argument.

The reason for that is, that

- XMPP clients usually suck in that area, in my opinion. So the protocol would be fine for me and I'd like to see IM tied in with groupchat/channels, but really.. Look at the clients and it's like really, really crappy IRC clients (to get back to your point: Yes, those UIs are usually following IRC designs, just with look like from a decade in the past)

- Adoption. For company internal stuff XMPP is great. If someone with high profile (GTalk? Facebook Chat?) would build a product based on this protocol, it would boost the adoption tremendously. On the other hand, as I stated a couple of days earlier in another XMPP discussion: As long as Google or Facebook are not supporting federation, they are not really supporting the core feature of XMPP in my book.

Did they reinvent IRC? No, XMPP did. Years ago, it's an XMPP standard. This is just an IRC client look-alike that doesn't suck completely.

FB and GTalk DO use XMPP. I also imagine that AIM, MSN, and Skype all have some sort of a XMPP implementation as well since they all can talk to FB.

You misread my post - or I was just not clear enough.

I KNOW that they use XMPP. That's why I listed them. But both don't (as far as I know) support the multi user chat extension, the whole point of my answer.

What I wanted to say was this: I don't use the MUC in XMPP (a lot) instead of IRC, because it's just not used anywhere. Google, Facebook, could hopefully "just" add it to their existing chat infrastructure.

Better?

IIRC Google does support federation. At least with Google Apps for Domains, you can add some records to your DNS that enable federation for your domain.

Are we talking about the same thing? XMPP federation? If I've got an account on jabber.org or run ejabberd on my domain, I can add you@yourGAppsDomain.com as buddy, see your presence and can message you, without caring about the server your account is local to?

Edit: See elsewhere in the thread: You are correct, I am wrong. Federation is supported for GTalk since 2006: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/open-federation-for-g...

- XMPP clients usually suck in that area, in my opinion.

what do you use for irc? at least irssi and adium do irc and xmpp, i'm sure others do too.

If someone with high profile (GTalk? Facebook Chat?) would build a product based on this protocol, it would boost the adoption tremendously. On the other hand, as I stated a couple of days earlier in another XMPP discussion: As long as Google or Facebook are not supporting federation, they are not really supporting the core feature of XMPP in my book.

huh? google chat does have xmpp federation. i run my own jabber server and talk to a bunch of people that use google chat through the web interface or a jabber client.

IRC:

Well - irssi actually. But when I say that I think that the XMPP clients suck I'm talking about nice and clean GUI things. That I can force upon my non-technical peers.

My 'presence' in this discussion should show that I'm a strong xmpp proponent, crappy clients (in the 'Not for my SO' sense) or not.

pyre said the very same thing in this thread. Sorry for that - I'm clearly mistaken and need to figure out what the reason for this assessment was.. You (and pyre) are correct, federation was announced int 2006(!) here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/open-federation-for-g...

Thanks a lot for the clarification.

If you dislike existing XMPP clients, you can use bitlbee (which is an IRC-XMPP gateway you can run on your server) and use your favorite IRC client.

I actually only dislike the MUC presentation most of the time. It always feels bolted on to me.

As I said elsewhere in this thread I'm not really having an issue for myself, but I've yet to find a decent client that I can hand to my peers. That's why I actually like the idea of this project, I guess.

Don't get the negativity. Is there a Javascript-API scriptable, browser-based IRC client out there?

Except that only techies are able to use IRC. You can throw this on a web server and anyone will be able to use it. You could use it for your church chat room or something.

Er, no. That's like saying Linux is only CLI. It's outdated misinformation. There are loads of web clients, and you wouldn't believe what kinds of tech illiterate people I've seen on some networks.

I can't tell the difference between IM and IRC in Adium. It's the best non-IRC, IRC client.

Pidgin is another multi-protocol popular option.

Does Pidgin do IRC? I didn't think it did.

I wanted to switch to Pidgin a while back because it had support for the kind of encryption I wanted (public key) and Adium didn't, but I ended up not doing it and I thought the reason was because Pidgin doesn't do IRC.

Am I misinformed?

I just checked to make sure, it does. I think it's had it for years, too.

Yep: Pidgen has supported IRC so long that back when I was still using it, and the project hadn't yet been renamed from Gaim, it already supported it; it had a few stupidities, and didn't support userhost-masks for buddy bindings (something that simply "makes sense" if you use IRC enough), but it definitely worked and still does (I have friends who use it all the time for IRC, and one who even contributes patches to it).

IRC is listed as a supported protocol on the front page of http://www.pidgin.im/

The Pidgin developers are also the libpurple developers- if Adium supports it, so does Pidgin.

This hasn't always gone the other way however. Adium finally added support for IRC recently, though pidgin and libpurple have had it for years.

Both Pidgin and Adium are based on libpurple[1], which does support IRC.

1. http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/WhatIsLibpurple

"Pidgin is compatible with the following chat networks out of the box: AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, MySpaceIM, and Zephyr."[2]

2. http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/pidgin

Uhm. Some clarifications.

http://www.adium.im/about/ ->

"Based on the _libpurple_ protocol library, Adium can connect you to any number of messaging accounts on any combination of supported messaging services (see further down for the list) and then chat with other people using those services." (Emphasis mine)

http://trac.adium.im/wiki/LibPurple ->

"Libpurple is the library which provides network-level connectivity for most services in Adium. Like Adium itself, it is licensed under the GPL. In addition to Adium, libpurple is the core of the Linux and Windows IM clients Pidgin and Finch. (...)

Libpurple was previously named Libgaim. "

So yeah, Pidgin is an option, because neither Adium nor Pidgin speak IRC, libpurple does. The support should be ~the same~, of course depending on the version of the library used.

More info: http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/WhatIsLibpurple

It's funny that your parent is downvoted below zero when he's absolutely right. I don't use IRC very much, but the last time I did, I wanted to use the name I'd registered with previously. Unfortunately, Pidgin kept telling me my name was already in use or some crap. It was quite difficult at the time, not being an initiate in the appropriate vocabulary, to figure out the search terms to use to discover that I needed to "ghost" the user or some ridiculous unintuitive incantation. I may have got the details wrong, but that only confirms my point. IRC is too hard for non-techies. I'm a programmer by profession, and if it gives me the slightest hassle, it's too hard for other people.

Maybe a nice client could make this pain go away, but I doubt it. All the ones I've tried have suffered from the same learning curve problem and the same in-grained assumptions that come from regular use of IRC. Even if one were easy and elegant, I'm not sure that could overcome the negative network effects of so many clients, billed as IRC, doing it badly. I'm not going to analyze it in detail right now, but there's myriad subtracting reinforcements from a community that mostly uses user-unfriendly clients and protocols. You can't just make one good client and get a tipping point. In fact, desktop linux does look like a good analogy here.

Moreover, it would be disingenuous to claim that IRC being techie-unfriendly is "outdated" when the majority of clients and tech how-tos pointing to clients are the same as they ever were. I would guess that the majority of IRC use is still done on unfriendly clients, e.g., Pidgin. One or two low share clients existing don't speak for IRC.

Now, I'm not saying XMPP or this client is an answer. But, yes, IRC is and always will be unpopular with the non-tech population.

You are absolutely right and I have no idea why you are being downvoted. When is the last time anyone has done IRC in the browser?

What this widget does is potentially bring Facebook Chat or Gmail style Chat to your site. That's worthwhile.

Mibbit is actually pretty good if you want to chat on IRC via a web browser.

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