Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was born in 1988 to help people message each over over the pre-web internet. While many other programs have become more popular since then, such as Whatsapp, Google Allo, and Slack, IRC lives on primarily in developer communities. Now, IRC developers are updating the venerable protocol to revitalize it for the 21st century.
IRC, the grandfather of online chat systems, is trying to make a comeback with a new, unified version.
The new IRC, IRCv3, includes several new features:
Many of these features have already been present in some IRC clients. The IRCv3 Working Group is a group of IRC client and server programmers working to enhance, maintain, and perhaps most important of all, standardize the IRC protocol.
Even with all these changes, the new IRC looks a lot like the old IRC. No matter what IRC client you us, for example, mIRC, WeeChat, Pidgin, or if you connect to IRC servers via a web gateway, IRC remains a short -- one line -- series of text driven online communities.
Doesn't sound practical? Tell Twitter that. It's where they got the idea that 140 characters was enough.
Unlike Google Hangouts or Skype, IRC doesn't include video or Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP). It also doesn't automatically delete messages after they've been received like Snapchat. On the other hand, IRC is still very handy. As Adobe pointed out recently with email, just because a technology is old, doesn't mean it's not useful.
Related Stories: