Slight aside: I think one of the big problems in the IRC and XMPP communities is that we discuss them as if the protocol itself or the public federated network

Slight aside: I think one of the big problems in the IRC and XMPP communities is that we discuss them as if the protocol itself or the public federated network (in the case of Jabber) were a "messaging product", but it's really not. Someone could (and should) build a messaging product with XMPP or IRC. HipChat started out that way a bit, but then tacked on more and more proprietary bits, or abused the XMPP protocol in its own clients enough that it could hardly be called XMPP anymore, which was a real shame.