Over 1.5 decade ago, a bunch of us were addicted to irc, I lived on channels such as #coders, #nlcoders, #demoscene, sneaked in on #vlaanderen to see when the Leuven locals were heading to the pub, then started joining multiple Linux and Open Source related channels around 94...
Then some weirdos had an alternative way of chatting ICQ, then the folks from Redmond reinvented the wheel... Luckily XMPP arrived and Jabber became the open alternative, but still all of this time irc stayed
Then twitter came and us Open Source peeps are obviously denting via identi.ca But while Twitter / Identica are nothing more than todays version of Instant Messaging only in broadcast rather than multicast mode irc still stays the best way to discuss.
And irc starts to become more and more active again There are lot of regular project channels and now there is #devopsdays , ##infra-talk and different other channels that are being much more frequented than before again ...
You might wanna join us again on irc.freenode.net that is :)
PS. And whatever they tell you .... Wave is not usable for online meetings ;)
And don't even get me started about Buzz
