[x0ner]

Interesting to see someone who is using IRC in this fashion. I personally have been an advocate of using XMPP in the same way. While IRC offers a good amount of features, XMPP provides the ability to scale and dive into multiple different realms. Just one example that comes to mind is constant updates from your XMPP bots, channels, etc. in a single location similar to Twitter, but for your development.

[Zev]

IRC is easy. Its a basic text protocol that requires a socket and some minimal parsing to work with. Whenever I use XMPP, its never that simple. The protocol is too verbose for its own good imho.

[jackolas]

Xmpp allows you to be a bit more secure and fine tune the usage. If your client or library doesn't actually make this simpler, something has failed.

[arosien]

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle.

[Zev]

Of course! All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection!

More seriously, are you saying that SSL/TLS and SASL are both insecure?

[arosien]

You are so enterprisey! :)

We'll bridge protocols if we need to cross that, um, bridge.