IRC is dead, long live IRC
royal.pingdom.com
royal.pingdom.com
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, since, you know, these are tech startups...
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?”
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 :)
For scale, Rails was released in June 2004, four months after Facebook's launch.
So I could definitely see myself posing that exact same question to Marc Andreessen.
He's asking what netscape the group, as in the people building the software did, not what the software did.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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 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.
(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.)
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.
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/
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.
The only complaint about IRC that I've heard in the past was SSL, however we added SSL to the connection without problems.
I work at Google Dublin, and we consider IRC to be an invaluable business tool. There really isn't a replacement for it.
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.
> 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
And I think that's the draw...when you're young, bright, and ostracized by your peers for wanting to discuss "serious" topics like professional gaming strategy or programming, IRC is a panacea. You can chat with people who don't care about your age and will take you seriously as long as you're capable of intelligent discourse on the topics that interest you.
As I've grown older and formed a network of my peers, I've gradually stopped using IRC, but it will always hold a dear place in my heart because it gave me an outlet for my creativity and passion at a time in my childhood when there were no such outlets in the "real world".
You liked it and gave it a positive review, and at 15, that was really huge for me and kept me hungry to keep coding.
So, thanks!
I've met my fianceé on IRC, got friends for life from all over the world through IRC, got jobs and assignments through IRC and I almost daily solve complex problems with the help of my community and network of friends and contacts through IRC! I've yet to find a tool that comes even remotely close to being as useful for me as IRC.
On QuakeNet we're regularly inviting companies to have developer chats, beta-key giveaways, and we have partnership with events like Dreamhack, for example.
On DALnet we've modernized our webchat (go to http://www.dal.net and give it a shot if you don't have an IRC client installed) using qwebirc (originally written for QuakeNet; but a lot of networks have chosen to use it) and also cooperated with mibbit.com and kiwiirc.com for allowing access.
At work I also run a smaller network with around 50 colleagues more or less actively chatting and using it on a daily basis. Digital office landscape working very well for people both at the office, at home or spread out over other cities.
A lot of applications, websites and services would benefit a lot by not having to reinvent the logic of messaging again by simply writing a frontend to an IRC server and have so so so much for free. Either on their own with an IRC server, or by setting it up towards one of our existing networks. If someone is interested to discuss such ideas, please just ask here or privately!
TL;DR: IRC still kicks ass! :)
Other than that irssi has a pretty good activity tracker; and combined with a script to allow me to filter out things/channels that I don't want to trigger activity (joins, parts for example, and certain channels I just don't care as much about). On top of this I just have a hotkey bound to "/window goto active" that basically takes you to the windows with the highest activity and the lowest identifier. These ones combined does most of the trick.
But its obvious I can't read and keep active track of 120 channels, often I just briefly glance through things, if someone has lots of activity and/or mentions of me I appear and can keep track. Except that its just manual choice of what channel I want to use at the moment. :)
Not a perfect system, but works for me.
In my experience, IRC today is a godsend if you want to talk to techie types, and largely pointless for anything else.
So it'd be no surprise to me if most of the people reading HN use IRC all the time, whilst the majority of the rest of the world considers it dead (if it's heard of it at all)
> "How do I allocate a string?"
> "But what is a string?"
> "You know that thing with letters in it. Seriously how do I allocate a string?"
> "Sorry we don't know what a string is, you'll need to define it for us first"
> "OK it's a contiguous chunk of bytes in RAM"
> "Sorry C has no concept of bytes or RAM."
That kind of impractical nonsense.
Interesting that IRC actually predates the web. I find it very useful at times.
In Fall 1993, I was a freshman at Vanderbilt and I was sitting in a computer lab, working on a CS assignment. There was an upperclassman guy sitting next to me, chatting on IRC. I'd never seen this before but I was intrigued. I was an avid BBSer and FidoNET sysop (LOL) and the idea of pan-Internet chat was fascinating. I asked him how I could use this program and he showed me how to launch the client on our school's VAX system. I was hooked and began to spend my weekday nights at the lab, chatting on IRC.
A month or so later, I got a call from my father and he was pissed. He had gotten a bill from the school for $800 of "computer time". As it turns out, the school gave every student a small amount of CPU time on the CTRVAX system to register for classes and send e-mail. I was a VMS rookie and I wasn't aware that I had to exit the IRC program when I was finished. I'd just been closing the telnet session and that left IRC running, eating up CPU time. It was like a cell phone data plan: you had your quota and everything over that was very expensive. After I got the call from my dad, I went to the people who ran the VAX and begged them for mercy on this bill. They were merciful but suggested that I find another system to IRC from. They suggested the Sun Microsystems desktops in the CS lab. The Suns were great because there was always a wait to get an open PC in this busy lab but the Suns were unpopular and always available. I'd never used SunOS before but some guy in the lab helped me get started with it.
These SPARCstations were very bare-bones. They had the Sun C compiler and of course OpenView but that's about it. I didn't know anything about compiling OSS back in 93 so I used a popular method to get a client installed. There was a server, sci.dixie.edu, that you would telnet to:
% telnet sci.dixie.edu 1 | sh
Yeah, I actually piped the output of a telnet session to sh(1). Unthinkable nowadays but this is how most of us got started. A few minutes of compiling later, I was up and running with a SunOS IRC client. Over time, I learned more about the Sun workstations and eventually because a Sun sysadmin.
I was a steady IRCer (terrapen on EFnet) until around 2003 or so, when the juvenile politics and fighting got to be too much.
I remember once I had built a IRC-server running in my mIRC, with all the robots (registering or protecting a channel) also from my mIRC. And then, on top of that, I had made a custom IRC-client with custom @windows.. We were averaging three users on my server, but oh my, that was cool at that time.
I even remember (I was very young at that time) that internet got shut down.. but I was still connected to my server. And I thought I had found a bug in Internet ;-) Obviously, I was just connected to localhost.. but the "What!!" moment was very funny.
IRC and Email is the only sane ways to communicate online at the moment. (In my opinion)
As such, I believe the second part of the title refers to an adapting ("new") form of IRC. As mentioned in the article, projects to add video chat support and the likes. The old IRC is dead (well, dying at least by the looks of it), a new adapted version is the future. [According to the article]
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.
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.
The potential problem with XML is the overhead. I'm not sure that's been an issue so far, though.
The claimed scope is so broad, though, that it's hard even to figure out a good starting point for further investigation.
The idiosyncracies that you have to get into when you want to write a proper client for humans, and what you actually have to worry about if your aim is just writing tools that use IRC (internal deployment bots, or whatnot) are miles apart. The vast majority of users will only be interested in the second.
Just follow the RFCs for the features that you need, and ignore everything else.
Anyway, IRC is plainly simple if you look at it's competition. I can use IRC with netcat without any significant effort; there are not a lot of other things I can say that about.
There are tons of alternatives, but none with the simple ubiquity of IRC.
IRC fails for me for a few reasons. First, I have to set up a SSH tunnel to use it. It's inconvenient, doesn't always start & restart automatically, but it's required because we want our communications to be private, and we're a distributed company.
Second, I have to set up special configs just to be alerted when my name is brought up. I can't keep up with IRC and actually get any work done, so I have to figure out my current program's implementation of an address book/macros/whatever in order to just be alerted when someone's trying to get my attention. It's also another venue I have to go into and manually mark myself as AFK (something most modern communication programs handle automatically).
Third, its interface is arcane. I never got into IRC when I was younger (and it was in its heyday), and so I don't have the plethora of commands at my fingertips when I want to get something done. Opme? Couldn't tell you how to do that, sorry. I'm sure I could learn, but for something so niche (even within our company), it's not worth the time.
Finally, there are just better programs out there for communicating amongst small (and not so small) groups, that don't require you to idle in a chatroom to ensure you don't loose anything.
[EDIT] As an addendum, there's a lot of mention of IRCs utility in open source. I can't count the number of times I've downloaded software and joined an open source chat with dozens of people in it, just to find out that everyone's idling, and the chances of getting a (useful) response before I could look through the code myself are tiny.
Think of them as being "on call."
Nobody advocates abandoning email for IRC. Right tool for the job, like anything else in life.
1) handles ssh tunnels for me after being configured
2) Automatically handles notifications that I'm being talked to
3) Can retrieve chatlogs from when I'm offline
4) Handles afking automatically
5) Encrypts chats between people
for the mac? It would be really useful.
5) Use PGP/GPG and email if you don't trust your IRC server. If you do, just use SSL. Since this is presumably an internal server, why wouldn't you trust it? There are of course encryption plugins for all the major IRC clients, but if you think you need one you are almost certainly Doing It Wrong(tm).
I don't know any Mac specific clients, not sure why you would want one.
Which doesn't resolve issue 1 (since the server is not available outside of 127.0.0.1 on the ssh host), or issue 3 since it can't see what happened when I was offline (though the bouncer idea is a good one, if fundamentally flawed in that it requires its own full time connection to the IRC server). My computer travels with me, and can not maintain a full time connection to the internet.
> There are of course encryption plugins for all the major IRC clients, but if you think you need one you are almost certainly Doing It Wrong(tm).
Why? Not everyone in the company needs access to client data. Why would I not want encryption options? The marketing folks don't need to know the internal hostnames of a client. The sales folks don't need a copy of customer chats while troubleshooting an issue.
> not sure why you would want one
Seems like a trip into OS holy war territory that I have no desire to get into.
You can only access this IRC server from the machine it is running on... but anyone in the company has highly priveleged access to it? But you can't run a client on the machine itself? And why would you be running a BNC locally? Who the hell set this system up, and do they run your mail system like this too?
There are so many PEBKACs here they are hard to count.
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.
Fortunately, for me, most of my friends that I met through IRC are my age (+/- a year or two), which I always found to be pretty neat. The conversation is always active for the most part, and most of the guys are in the US and UK, so it's usually active all day. Over the years, we merged/linked with other networks, welcomed new people, hosted channels for various open-source projects, but just as the article states, usage has definitely declined. I can recall back in 2009-2010 when we had servers in three continents to reduce potential lag when things were really going well. Now, the IRCd hub and services run comfortably on a Linode 512 without links.
Part of the reason I think we're still alive and well is because of the admins (NetAdmins, IRCops, etc). You'll notice that on most networks, admins are arrogant and very strict when it comes to messages per second, or banned words/topics. As long as nothing illegal was being discussed nor transmitted, we don't do anything. In all honestly, I can't recall the last time I used any commands to ban, Gline, Kline, and so on. This is what contributes to a network's longevity.
It's comforting that IRCd(s) are still being actively developed, but I would really love to see its popularity pick back up again. It's really an amazing tool for communication, whether it's used for collaborating with coworkers, discussing open source projects, or even for a casual chat.
If you find yourself looking to connect and need a client, you might want to download Textual (for OS X only, available through the Mac App Store or Github).
Especially when running your own server this would be a more secure alternative.
Do note that I will be hosting this on EC2, so some semblance of authentication/security would be welcome.
Neither are the friendliest in terms of setting up and configuring, but it's really not too bad. If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me a message on IRC (irc.flux.cd #flux) or Twitter (@Lyetz) and I could help you out.
Popular clients integrate with it? Check.
Single Sign on? Check.
Non-technical user? They sign in, they type, they see what others type. What's not to understand?
The only thing you mentioned that IRC doesn't have is automated contact list sharing.
It became pretty popular and it was a great way to communicate between branch offices.
Event though UnrealIRCd doesn't have the best reputation, it is still a quite easy-to-set-up IRCd and is still in more-or-less active development...
Depending if you'll only use this internally or not you might want to set up Services to provide some facility to register nicknames and make sure of the identity of participants in the chat - take a look at either Anope or Atheme for that.
Another IRCd to keep an eye on is ngIRCd [1], which claims to be small and lightweight - however i haven't had a chance to try it out yet...
Back in the day you could find a server to talk about your favorite band or hobby or tv show. Meet like minded people and make friends.
Today Twitter or Google+ is probably the closest alternative but are lacking the essence of what IRC was.
At scussion.com we are working on building realtime chat to be integrated with these communities (interest based communities).
I would love to just have a hangout to chat about sci if or sport like IRC was back in the day.
The weird thing for me was seeing how extensively the military uses IRC (for tactical communications relay -- various headquarters use it to relay information about operations, and they run structured channels for different levels of the organization). Sadly, mainly with mIRC as a client.
Jabbr (http://www.jabbr.net) is a good replacement for IRC, with features such as offline history, and embedded content (for code snippets, etc.)
(some of my friends use it and seem happy with it, I have not tried it myself).
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.
They could enforce that kind of bizarro rules during the time IRC and Usenet were the only game in town, but everybody sane jumped off the moment remotely usable alternatives (anything web based like phpbb, shudder) appeared on the horizon.
So you cant really say that IRC and Usenet died some kind of natural death, they were simply slowly suffocated by the deranged "get off my lawn" incumbents.
If there was some way to add ads to Usenet and IRC, we (well, 'they') wouldn't have had to re-invent it all poorly in the form of phpBB and its thousands similar packages, and various 'chat' or 'private messaging' apps and websites. What life could have been, if there was one good dedicated client that could handle all user messaging 'sites'...
Freenode, for example, keeps growing steadily since 2007, many of the smaller networks show pretty much a flatline or cross-shift in the same timeframe.
As it stands the networks still serve ~500k daily users; seems a bit early to call it "dead".
Had no clue IRC had died.