The good news is that Slack/Hipchat/Campfire seems to be bringing channel based communication back in the workplace. Most of the places that use them use it as

The good news is that Slack/Hipchat/Campfire seems to be bringing channel based communication back in the workplace. Most of the places that use them use it as the hub. There are obviously lots of additional little features (emoticons, inline images, etc) -- but at least with Slack, you can setup an IRC connector and just use your plain old IRC client.