This is really cool. I'll never be lonely again. ;-) Hanging out in IRC is a much lower barrier to entry than IM.

What "barrier" is lower? Technical or social?

Do you think people just feel more comfortable tapping you on the shoulder this way? Whereas giving out your IM handle, and being connected, doesn't seem as welcoming (maybe because that's most people's default settings, so it seems less intentional)?

Social. I think people "hang out" on IRC whereas IM is more intentional. Also, people can chat with each other on IRC whereas IM is one-on-one.

what kind of client do you use for your wild irc-ing? i've never been able to find one that was as handy as the aol and yahoo IM gizmos.

Personally, even though I don't use it a lot, I think IRC still rocks and should still be the standard for messaging applications. It has problems with splits and lack of hierarchy and all that, but it's still the most mature, most scalable and most open platform for chatting (all in my humble opinion, of course).

I'm using SNAK on the Mac, but I think Mozilla does it well too.

Actually, I think IRC is great for many-to-many and jabber makes sense for one-to-one. I wouldn't compare IRC to IM. IRC is about hanging out and having a conference call style discussion whereas IM is much more one-on-one telephone call like I think.

That is an odd thing to say - getitng IRC set up and connected ot the right backbone has enough of a brrier to entry to excludemany people, whereas joining an AIM chatroom has a very low barrier, given the prevelance of AIM clients.

yup, the user interface and setup for IRC is not very intuitive. IRC culture is very fragmented, though things don't seem to be as bitter now as they were during the IRC wars of the early 90's. I found this article about the tao of IRC and this one with a bit of history in it.

OK Kevin dragged me over to an AIM chatroom and I have to admin. It's very similar to IRC and has some great things like faces. I was wrong, you were right Antoin.

Having said that, there's somethine about being on AOL that feels less "open" than being on servers run by hackers. Also, IRC seems more programable and open and for a newbie python script kiddie like me, that's a big plus.

Antoin. Interestsing links. So which is worse: Hackers arguing with each other or AOL buying ICQ and sitting on it.