This. All these people commenting on the premise that usenet is dead, don't realize it is alive and kicking. As is IRC:)
Since then a bunch of friends and I have run a tiny multi-server network after we all moved off the public networks.
Started a new job this past February, and I asked my boss during the interview how we handled inter-person communication since we're scattered all over the country. "We have our own internal IRC server if you know what that is..." I said "THANK YOU JESUS!" and he cracked up.
IRC is definitely still out there and heavily used.
Pretty amusing, too, because it was four people in an irc room, all of whom were also in the same physical room.
That would be exactly my own reaction if it would ever happen to me. But so far, unfortunately, it was always either Hipchat or Skype.
They used Hipchat, and it was neat - my coworkers there greeted me with inline memes. Having to use a proprietary client sucked, though.
I think the best solution would be a Hipchat/Slack-like IRC client.
I just set up bitlbee to do XMPP in irssi. Hipchat is accessible via XMPP. Lots of little annoying quirks but it was better than nothing.
Both the IBM LTC and Intel OTC maintain internal IRC servers. They aren't used by the entire company, but they're used by those Open Source groups. (Company-wide IM is still Sametime and Lync, respectively, but both of those are usable from Linux with Pidgin.)
The protocol is still under active development as well: http://ircv3.net