I find it super weird that new chat and messaging applications keep finding popularity. It seems like most of the features could be had by using a sufficiently

I find it super weird that new chat and messaging applications keep finding popularity. It seems like most of the features could be had by using a sufficiently featurefull IRC and email client. hmm. That could be an interesting project. Implement a social network using nntp, using public-key cryptography (with tight integration in the client) for access control. But seriously, I can see how some features of social networks would be hard to implement with nntp and clients... but I'm kind of missing out on why most of the newer chat networks are better than IRC.