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I work at google campus in london, an office for startups. Many weeks ago, somebody suggested on our yammer (business social network) that we should set up an i

• kybernetyk 14y ago
  Today's new tech startups are run by people who missed the time window when IRC was popular. They grew up with web based chats and instant messengers.
  • zalew 14y ago
    yep. for some context: One of the first times Zuckerberg and I (Mark Andreessen) got together, in 2005 or 2006, he stopped me in the middle of conversation and asked: “What did Netscape do?” http://www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_andreessen/all/1 http://www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_andreessen/all/1
    • rgbrenner 14y ago
      Andreessen: One of the first times Zuckerberg and I got together, in 2005 or 2006, he stopped me in the middle of conversation and asked: “What did Netscape do?” And I said, “What do you mean, what did Netscape do?” And he was like, “Dude, I was in junior high. I wasn’t paying attention. I have a hard time believing that. Zuckerberg is 6 months younger than me, and I remember Netscape clearly (the end/later part of it anyway).
      • octotoad 14y ago
        I know not everybody is a nostalgic nerd with a thing for tech industry history, but, yeah, I'm two years younger and even I was aware of the general history of Netscape's journey and choices by the time I was 14-15. Perhaps he was too busy putting his head down, pumping out a real product instead of procrastinating and focusing on the past :)
        • zalew 14y ago
          I'm more like: sooo, this dude didn't know crap about the internet and launched one of the biggest websites in the world. #fml
          • rgbrenner 14y ago
            this is what I was thinking too. maybe this explains why it was written in PHP? :)
            • mseebach 14y ago
              No. I have no numbers, but I'd say we're looking at 80-90% of all websites written in dorm rooms in 2003 were written in PHP. Most of the rest in classic ASP (which was barely 'classic' yet in 2003). For scale, Rails was released in June 2004, four months after Facebook's launch.
              • deleted 14y ago
                [deleted]
              • subsystem 14y ago
                Python was even seen as esoteric back then. http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
        • rgbrenner 14y ago
          I thought about this a little more.. I think the reason I find it so hard to believe is because of the MS antitrust trial. It was a huge thing at the time and Netscape was a big part of it... so unless you were completely oblivious to computers and the internet, it would be hard to not know about Netscape.
          • tdrnd 14y ago
            Strictly speaking, however, there is a difference between knowing about Netscape and knowing what they were doing. Myself, I used Netscape software daily between 1996 and 2000 something but can't say I really knew what the company was doing. Sure, I know all about that they released a web browser for free, but I have no real idea (without looking it up on Wikipedia) what they really did for their shareholders. So I could definitely see myself posing that exact same question to Marc Andreessen.
      • hdra 14y ago
        not that hard to believe. I am 20 now, and I didn't even know much about iPhone when it launched. All I thought about it was that its just another super expensive phone, like one of Nokia's luxury phone. Coz I wasn't interested to these things at the time, and well, I wasn't paying attention.
        • jwoah12 14y ago
          A more apt comparison would be if you didn't know about the iPhone now. This conversation between Zuckerberg and Andreessen didn't happen right when Netscape came out.
          • hdra 14y ago
            well, there is now way for me to do a comparison using my knowledge about iPhone if I didn't about iPhone today, isn't it? :)
    • blhack 14y ago
      Misunderstand the quote more? He's asking what netscape the group, as in the people building the software did, not what the software did.
  • octotoad 14y ago
    I came on the scene around the time IM and web-based chat rooms (arguably) peaked; 2000. In the 'FOSS' world, aside from mailing lists, IRC was the dominant means of communication. I'm only turning 27 this year, and I really can't wrap my head around people using things like vendor-specific IM or web-based chat rooms as a replacement for IRC in similar scenarios. I know it's basically the same thing; a centralised gathering point tied to a server run by a particular company or organisation, but, I don't know...IRC just feels like a more 'transparent', neutral form/protocol to me.
  • blhack 14y ago
    Unless I'm old at 25: bullshit. The people who go "into tech" during college because they saw Mark Zuckerberg making dumptrucks full of money probably don't know what IRC is, but the people who had to get into IRC chats to figure out how to make linux work on our hardware (like me, and most of my peers) absolutely grew up with IRC. I grew up having friends that I met solely on IRC, and having it be a staple of the way that I communicated with certain groups of people; it's the same story with most of the people I hang out with.
    • charleshaanel 14y ago
      Actually that would be a good behavioral question for a job interview. "How often do you use IRC" - says alot about the person.... I've taken to using private Skype rooms a lot (which is an underutilized resource and, incidentally, can be monetized for niche markets)
    • jlgreco 14y ago
      Yeah, I realized the other day that in a year or two I'll have been using IRC for half my life. Not adult life mind, my whole life. That would be impressive ...were I old.
• chadillac83 14y ago
  My company is much smaller than Google but still rather large and almost 100% IT focused. We jokingly setup an internal VPN accessible IRC server a couple years ago to share links and just have a development/sysadmin chat room. As we started using it more we started setting up specific channels for departments like #dev, #ops, #random, #dba. Now we use it for quick communications between departments, trading links, sharing articles from online, discussing technologies in an open forum, discussing infrastructure changes or proposing changes. etc. We recently have actually configured various systems like IDS, syslog, etc. to also dump to dedicated channels and use it as a throw away log dumping medium. Want to keep an eye on the db logs? #dblogs want to see how the live web cluster is doing #weblogs want to see IDS reports in real time #idslogs. What started as a joke has actually become a staple of company wide team communication and systems monitoring... plus I get to slap coworkers with trouts.
  • andypants 14y ago
    That sounds like such an awesome setup!
  • narag 14y ago
    A long time ago, at work, I wrote a mIRC plugin to display incoming messages from a bot on a separate stay-on-top window. IRC has indeed a lot of business applications.
  • merlincorey 14y ago
    At another small startup, I setup an IRC server when I was told they were using Bonjour before I got there. It started out very similarly for us -- just a place to chat with the other developers and ops people and share some links. Over time, several IRC bots were created doing real work for the company; most importantly while I was there, the deploy robot would cut a release from revision control for the particular project being deployed and deploy where it was told (or even revert to a previous release if necessary), only listening to people based on their umasks (everyone had their own hostnames with properly setup RDNS too, but that was another matter)... Worked quite well! Can't say if it still does, or not, as I am no longer there.
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• jeffool 14y ago
  I don't know about know, but I remember being told as recently as a couple of years ago that id Software used it as an inter-office chat tool. I certainly have imagined its use at jobs before, even when I worked in call centers. It couldn't be hard to let the rank and file chat when not on a call. (Yes, they were oddly draconian about doing nothing, or reading a book, between calls. Forget your book and your day is ruined.)
  • kybernetyk 14y ago
    Around 2000 when I got out of school I was working as a programmer for a company that made J2ME mobile games. They were sitting in the Netherlands and had hired a bunch of teleworkers. Mostly from Germany and Poland. And whenever there were meetings (even with the bosses) we used IRC for that. It was pretty cool. You were also allowed to go AFK but you had to leave your client open to read the backlogs. (People knew beforehand if their active presence was required in the meeting.)
• mootothemax 14y ago
  Shame, because I find irc to still be the best chat I've ever used. I agree with you. I recently worked with a lovely tech agency who used IRC for a lot of communication amongst their office and remote-based workers. Typically, each project had its own chat room, and we'd create private chat rooms as required if only a couple of us needed to discuss something. I was really surprised with how well the system worked - and how easy it was to use! It'd probably been a decade or more since I'd used IRC, and it was a really pleasant rediscovery. In short: I'll be recommending its use in future.
• Symmetry 14y ago
  IRC is nice, but I still like Zephyr, the origonal IM system, better. Except for the little problem with NAT traversal...
  • __alexs 14y ago
    The UNIX write and talk commands are both over a decade older than Zephyr.
  • gwillen 14y ago
    NAT traversal barely scratches the surface. The Zephyr protocol is a crime against nature and nature's god. :-P (I do like the class/instance structure, though, and that's never been duplicated anywhere else as far as I know. A friend and I made a plugin for irssi that allows you to use instances on IRC, but it never caught on.)
• nso 14y ago
  Try getting them onboard with www.hipchat.com. Even tho I still use IRC at home we use hipchat at work, and it works pretty well. The ability to easily send screengrabs and similar stuff to other users is pretty handy.
  • Karunamon 14y ago
    Unfortunately Hipchat won't work for my day job because the higher ups have this thing against hosted services (and given the security climate nowadays I can't entirely blame them). Any idea of something like Hipchat but hostable internally?
    • nso 14y ago
      Let them know you'd like a self-hosted version: https://www.hipchat.com/firewall https://www.hipchat.com/firewall This one looks like a carbon copy of hipchat, but I have no experience with it: http://kikuchat.com/ http://kikuchat.com/
  • slowpoke 14y ago
    Is this supposed to be a joke? Why in all seven hells would you use a proprietary, hosted service which brings you zero advantages over a time-tested, open and simple network protocol which you can extremely easily host and extend yourself? I don't get you people. I really don't get you.
    • jlgreco 14y ago
      I've just started writing it off as "Because startup!". There really are just some protocols that don't need to be reinvented as companies. Yeah, twitter is better than finger, but IRC has proven itself.
      • andyzweb 14y ago
        >twitter is better than finger sure if you enjoy proprietary walled gardens with uptime issues
• debacle 14y ago
  We ditched jabber for IRC at another company I previously worked at, and it became a staple for communication even though our entire office was only ~800 square feet.
  • pkulak 14y ago
    Interesting. My company ditched IRC for Jabber. Why did you guys make the switch in that direction?
    • debacle 14y ago
      Simplicity, really. It's easier to find stable IRC clients, and IRC servers tend to be better than Jabber servers. The only complaint about IRC that I've heard in the past was SSL, however we added SSL to the connection without problems.
• Filligree 14y ago
  Funny. I work at Google Dublin, and we consider IRC to be an invaluable business tool. There really isn't a replacement for it.
• hrktb 14y ago
  If you have IM clients with easy to use group chat features I think IRC might not be the best choice for professional use. Keeping it within the IM clients allows to have a single place to log discussions and you know everyone is using roughly the same features. Actually making it an explicit task to invite the right people to discuss when you need a group chat can be a feature in itself. Now I love IRC, but for private use only.
• clobber 14y ago
  > an office for startups > The general response was along the lines of 'that still exists?', 'hey, I heard windows 3.0 is being released', etc. Not shocked that a bunch of kids whose first experience with a computer was Windows XP and all trying to recreate facebook have never heard of IRC