Right, that's the sadness of it. IRC clients were lacking, and the "auth for free" that came with AIM/Yahoo (and now Facebook) made the difference. It would ha

Right, that's the sadness of it. IRC clients were lacking, and the "auth for free" that came with AIM/Yahoo (and now Facebook) made the difference. It would have been 100x simpler to create a compelling GUI client for IRC (back in the day, they sort of exist now), than to build an entire new protocol, server infrastructure, and GUI client to support a branded and controlled chat. Never mind multiple competing and incompatible versions of same. Conflicting interests, obviously. But as a technology, "chat" did not improve materially between 1990 and 2010 or so.