Raúl Santos
Well, today I found out one of the likely reasons for IRC to have been dumped for MSN Messenger and other IM networks.
Basically, most of the people that used IRC and now use IM are ignorant. Why? For two reasons…
- One of their problems seems to be that they think IRC doesn’t allow you to see which of your buddies are online. Yes, they do. I know, it’s so stupid it’s hard to believe but it’s true. I’ve been told this a bunch of times and I’ve read it in quite a few places, too. For example, check this comment from a Slashdot reader on the article I mentioned yesterday about MSN and Yahoo! Messengers being able to talk to each other:
I’d say my major use of IM systems isn’t to actually communicate to people via messages but to communicate status: the ability to run my eyes down my buddy list and see exactly who’s available and who’s not and who’s at lunch/in a meeting/whatever has changed how I work. IRC is less about having a fixed list of people and knowing their status all the time, then having a particular “place” (channel) and letting people come and go. Although you could probably emulate an IM buddy list by telling everyone to go sit in the same IRC channel (and IM networks sometimes try to emulate chat rooms), they’re fundamentally different approaches to communication.
So this guy doesn’t know the difference between “then” and “than” but that doesn’t surprise me much, coming from someone who says what this guy said. How about turning on your IRC client’s notify list? That’s probably too much work, isn’t it? Yeah, right…
- Voice and video chat. Why on earth does everyone want an application that does absolutely everything?? I wonder if Microsoft Word would gain chat abilities, would people drop those fancy IM clients - sorry, I guess in such a situation, they’d be “ugly” clients, now - in favor of MS Word? I don’t think so. And why? Because then it would be evident that their IM client, something they wanted to use for something really simple, was bloated. Since people don’t realize that having voice and video chat on the same text chat client is also bloating that software, they still want it. If I want to talk to someone or see them, I’ll use my phone or Skype or Ekiga (formerly known as Gnomemeeting).
Those - along with the fact that the lame-excuse-for-an-IM-client Microsoft calls “MSN Messenger” comes bundled with Windows and people are too lazy to look for something better - are probably the reasons that sent IRC down to the bottom of the sea.
Fortunately, some smart people (mostly developers, from what I see) still know that IRC is a far better method to communicate than those crappy IM networks, so when I need help with something, I can still go to irc.freenode.net and I have a bunch of channels where people will be able to help me - and I can also help other people.