Internet Relay Chat
November 18, 2008
It’s about dialogs with multiple people. around since the ’80s, and still kicking with over 100,000 active users per day. Bots are the programming element that seems to be hit upon over and over and over again. People too lazy to open up their web browsers, or people just trying to save bandwidth use them for information or to automate tasks. For me, it’s down to sports, Twitter, weather, and html verification. Why head to Yahoo with all the bloat when I can just type in ::weather in a channel? Same for sports, albeit my implementations aren’t as sophisticated as others.
Why so interested? Well, it’s more so the interaction one gets. Blogs are one thing, but it really is a delayed response between people, often misunderstood or unable to cover certain points. As IRC is line by line, it’s easy to elaborate or stay as simple as needed, without the wait for comment approval, responses, etc. As well, IRC clients have established many ways to notify. Flashing the window, changing the window title, tray icon blinking, and popup alerts all are used to grab the attention of the user immediately, as opposed to blogs or Twitter.
What about IM? Instant Messangers are cool and all, but their group chat feature is usually gimped after the first half dozen people or so. Any more than that and it becomes inefficient in memory, bandwidth, and screen bloat. Avatars and different size fonts show up to create a mess. Again, this ole IRC is text based completely, allowing clients to interpret the chat differently. Prefer the avatars? You can have it, but to those who want to do away with all of the eye candy can, and that’s one of the essential reasons IRC is still around.
