What happened to IRC?

I had a conversation today about the lack of popularity of chat rooms and Internet Relay Chat (IRC).  Why aren’t these mediums used much anymore?  I remember that chat was one of the biggest draws of AOL.  To me, social networks are a more inefficient version of chat rooms and IRC.  I used to “hang out” in different IRC channels based on my interests.  The tactile feedback you get from joining an IRC room and seeing active conversations is unmatched by any social network ‘wall’ or ‘feed’.

The social networks of today don’t make me feel connected.  There’s no real substantive content on the various network’s homepages, and the various networks are more about connecting the people than the basis for the network itself.  In a chat room on IRC, you can go talk to real people interested in the same things, in real time.  There is a live feed–messages posted show up instantly to all.  There is private messaging, and file transfers.  Even secure private chat.

It would make a lot more sense to me to build social networking functionality on top of a platform technology like IRC.   So why isn’t IRC used for much other than piracy, open source, and justin.tv?  Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Tags: rants, social networks