[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.