In the W3CTeam, we use IRC extensively:
- among the system administration team: for quick-and-dirty support chats, and general monkeying around
- for record keeping in teleconferences; see scribe-bot
Its a limited form of RemotePresence.
It can help with the language barrier.
There are some technical limitations, though. It's not a hypertext medium; at least: clients don't seem to have any support for links except InYourFaceUrls?.
Some of the popular ICQ/AIM/yahoo chat etc. gizmos have nice fonts and links and such, but they have even worse scaling properties than IRC.
See:
- Liam's notes on IRC scalability, or lack thereof
- XML Protocol stuff; SOAP etc.
- JabberTechnology?
- KnowNow?
- BXXP
- IMAP is chatty, but it does interleaving.
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