[peterwwillis]

I can't think of a real-time streaming multimedia application that uses TCP. It probably exists, but nobody uses it; it's simply easier and more efficient to deal with lossy formats over a medium that doesn't care about data loss.

(Note that I said real-time. Buffering is fine for one-way communication, lousy for conversations)

[zokier]

For text chat TCP works perfectly fine. IRC and XMPP are the prime examples.

[nly]

Actually TCP is a problem for IRC because there's no (standard) way to query how much data has been received (well, acknowledged) by the other end. This is why if you're unexpectedly disconnected from an IRC bouncer while in a busy channel, the replay can still be incomplete.

Lag is also a pig sometimes.

Datagram protocols are just more natural for message-oriented communication.

[peterwwillis]

I wasn't talking about text chat.