[andypants]

I work at google campus in london, an office for startups. Many weeks ago, somebody suggested on our yammer (business social network) that we should set up an irc channel for the people who work here.

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...

[chadillac83]

My company is much smaller than Google but still rather large and almost 100% IT focused. We jokingly setup an internal VPN accessible IRC server a couple years ago to share links and just have a development/sysadmin chat room. As we started using it more we started setting up specific channels for departments like #dev, #ops, #random, #dba. Now we use it for quick communications between departments, trading links, sharing articles from online, discussing technologies in an open forum, discussing infrastructure changes or proposing changes. etc. We recently have actually configured various systems like IDS, syslog, etc. to also dump to dedicated channels and use it as a throw away log dumping medium. Want to keep an eye on the db logs? #dblogs want to see how the live web cluster is doing #weblogs want to see IDS reports in real time #idslogs.

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.

[merlincorey]

At another small startup, I setup an IRC server when I was told they were using Bonjour before I got there. It started out very similarly for us -- just a place to chat with the other developers and ops people and share some links. Over time, several IRC bots were created doing real work for the company; most importantly while I was there, the deploy robot would cut a release from revision control for the particular project being deployed and deploy where it was told (or even revert to a previous release if necessary), only listening to people based on their umasks (everyone had their own hostnames with properly setup RDNS too, but that was another matter)... Worked quite well! Can't say if it still does, or not, as I am no longer there.

[chipsy]

I've determined independently that a IRC server fills a sweet spot in the collaborative toolset. A basic IM system isn't good enough because it doesn't have channels, it doesn't give you a shared history. Email is heavy and induces people to spend too much time per message.

Sometimes it's good to have a light/noisy feed, and IRC is just fine for that job.

[Domenic_S]

> A basic IM system isn't good enough because it doesn't have channels, it doesn't give you a shared history.

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.

[jlgreco]

Eh, that's pretty much what BNCs or tmux/screen is for. The number of hours that I haven't been connected to IRC in the past 10 years is probably low-double digits. (I'm on several networks so a network outage won't knock me off IRC entirely.)

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.

[e1ven]

We use a IRC bouncer for this; It works really well to preserve history, and let me get messages when I'm offline.

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.

[adrr]

Checkout HipChat. Like IRC and has a desktop and web client. They also have API which you can use to post messages to channels from external sources. We have our Capistrano/Ant scripts post their status to our "Deployment" channel. Currently working on a bot that hooks into Jenkins so we can build via our "development" channel.

[patrickod]

We use Hipchat at work at the moment and while I like it overall there are some issues that they need to address.

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.

[viraptor]

The web client is a bit "special" though - after a day or two of running it with 4+ channels open the history will build up and jquery functions will start freezing the interaction. Flash/AIR client is much better, but... it's Flash/AIR (copy/paste issues, different set of fonts, message notifications not clear).

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.

[cdmoyer]

On the mac, at least, I've found the AIR client is really, really good. I haven't really run into any of the issues you mentioned and have been using it daily for several months.

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.)

[hnriot]

I don't agree that email is heavy at all. I see nothing here that couldn't be accomplished with email and/or a wiki. Sharing links over irc makes little sense, links belong on a wiki so they can be searched for and edited etc etc.

[jlgreco]

You would be hard pressed to find anybody using IRC who doesn't also use email and wikis. Once you add IRC to your toolbelt, those things, as if by magic, stop appearing to be the best tool for every job. Actually, it works that way with most tools I find.

[joezydeco]

But that's the appeal of IRC, the protocol is simple and it's easy to write tools that plugin and work with the stream.

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.

[narag]

A long time ago, at work, I wrote a mIRC plugin to display incoming messages from a bot on a separate stay-on-top window. IRC has indeed a lot of business applications.

[andypants]

That sounds like such an awesome setup!

[mootothemax]

Shame, because I find irc to still be the best chat I've ever used.

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.

[kybernetyk]

Today's new tech startups are run by people who missed the time window when IRC was popular. They grew up with web based chats and instant messengers.

[blhack]

Unless I'm old at 25: bullshit.

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.

[charleshaanel]

Actually that would be a good behavioral question for a job interview. "How often do you use IRC" - says alot about the person....

I've taken to using private Skype rooms a lot (which is an underutilized resource and, incidentally, can be monetized for niche markets)

[jlgreco]

Yeah, I realized the other day that in a year or two I'll have been using IRC for half my life. Not adult life mind, my whole life. That would be impressive ...were I old.

[octotoad]

I came on the scene around the time IM and web-based chat rooms (arguably) peaked; 2000. In the 'FOSS' world, aside from mailing lists, IRC was the dominant means of communication.

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.

[zalew]

yep. for some context:

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?”

http://www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_andreessen/all/1

[rgbrenner]

Andreessen: One of the first times Zuckerberg and I got together, in 2005 or 2006, he stopped me in the middle of conversation and asked: “What did Netscape do?” And I said, “What do you mean, what did Netscape do?” And he was like, “Dude, I was in junior high. I wasn’t paying attention.

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).

[octotoad]

I know not everybody is a nostalgic nerd with a thing for tech industry history, but, yeah, I'm two years younger and even I was aware of the general history of Netscape's journey and choices by the time I was 14-15.

Perhaps he was too busy putting his head down, pumping out a real product instead of procrastinating and focusing on the past :)

[rgbrenner]

I thought about this a little more.. I think the reason I find it so hard to believe is because of the MS antitrust trial. It was a huge thing at the time and Netscape was a big part of it... so unless you were completely oblivious to computers and the internet, it would be hard to not know about Netscape.

[tdrnd]

Strictly speaking, however, there is a difference between knowing about Netscape and knowing what they were doing. Myself, I used Netscape software daily between 1996 and 2000 something but can't say I really knew what the company was doing. Sure, I know all about that they released a web browser for free, but I have no real idea (without looking it up on Wikipedia) what they really did for their shareholders.

So I could definitely see myself posing that exact same question to Marc Andreessen.

[zalew]

I'm more like: sooo, this dude didn't know crap about the internet and launched one of the biggest websites in the world. #fml

[rgbrenner]

this is what I was thinking too. maybe this explains why it was written in PHP? :)

[hdra]

not that hard to believe. I am 20 now, and I didn't even know much about iPhone when it launched. All I thought about it was that its just another super expensive phone, like one of Nokia's luxury phone. Coz I wasn't interested to these things at the time, and well, I wasn't paying attention.

[jwoah12]

A more apt comparison would be if you didn't know about the iPhone now. This conversation between Zuckerberg and Andreessen didn't happen right when Netscape came out.

[hdra]

well, there is now way for me to do a comparison using my knowledge about iPhone if I didn't about iPhone today, isn't it? :)

[blhack]

Misunderstand the quote more?

He's asking what netscape the group, as in the people building the software did, not what the software did.

[Filligree]

Funny.

I work at Google Dublin, and we consider IRC to be an invaluable business tool. There really isn't a replacement for it.

[nso]

Try getting them onboard with www.hipchat.com.

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.

[slowpoke]

Is this supposed to be a joke? Why in all seven hells would you use a proprietary, hosted service which brings you zero advantages over a time-tested, open and simple network protocol which you can extremely easily host and extend yourself?

I don't get you people. I really don't get you.

[jlgreco]

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.

[andyzweb]

>twitter is better than finger

sure if you enjoy proprietary walled gardens with uptime issues

[cdmoyer]

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.)

[philsnow]

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.

[cdmoyer]

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.

[reinhardt]

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.

[Karunamon]

Unfortunately Hipchat won't work for my day job because the higher ups have this thing against hosted services (and given the security climate nowadays I can't entirely blame them).

Any idea of something like Hipchat but hostable internally?

[nso]

Let them know you'd like a self-hosted version: https://www.hipchat.com/firewall

This one looks like a carbon copy of hipchat, but I have no experience with it: http://kikuchat.com/

[debacle]

We ditched jabber for IRC at another company I previously worked at, and it became a staple for communication even though our entire office was only ~800 square feet.

[pkulak]

Interesting. My company ditched IRC for Jabber. Why did you guys make the switch in that direction?

[debacle]

Simplicity, really. It's easier to find stable IRC clients, and IRC servers tend to be better than Jabber servers.

The only complaint about IRC that I've heard in the past was SSL, however we added SSL to the connection without problems.

[hrktb]

If you have IM clients with easy to use group chat features I think IRC might not be the best choice for professional use. Keeping it within the IM clients allows to have a single place to log discussions and you know everyone is using roughly the same features.

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.

[jeffool]

I don't know about know, but I remember being told as recently as a couple of years ago that id Software used it as an inter-office chat tool. I certainly have imagined its use at jobs before, even when I worked in call centers. It couldn't be hard to let the rank and file chat when not on a call. (Yes, they were oddly draconian about doing nothing, or reading a book, between calls. Forget your book and your day is ruined.)

[kybernetyk]

Around 2000 when I got out of school I was working as a programmer for a company that made J2ME mobile games.

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.)

[Symmetry]

IRC is nice, but I still like Zephyr, the origonal IM system, better. Except for the little problem with NAT traversal...

[gwillen]

NAT traversal barely scratches the surface. The Zephyr protocol is a crime against nature and nature's god. :-P

(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.)

[__alexs]

The UNIX write and talk commands are both over a decade older than Zephyr.

[clobber]

> an office for startups

> 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