[spaky]

At our company we use Slack [1] all the time for chatting and keeping in touch. It's basically just an IRC front end. (Slack is co-founded by Stewart Butterfield of Flickr)

For me the big advantage is that it "just works" (web interface + mobile app) for everyone in the company whereas there is overhead to getting IRC setup. We had tried IRC previously and it didn't take. It also doesn't hurt that Slack looks sexy.

I think that IRC has really stuck around because it somehow really captures asynchronous group discussion, but also simultaneously keeps the barrier to participation really low. It makes total sense to me that the IRC community is still so strong.

[1] https://slack.com/

[jenius]

Same here, the ui is definitely a huge selling point for slack. IRC just looks terrible, every client I have tried looks bad and connections are unreliable. Slack is a great solution for that.