
How we use IRC at Last.fm - dcancel
http://www.metabrew.com/article/how-we-use-irc-at-lastfm/
======
tdavis
I remember years ago, when I basically lived on IRC. Hell, I still have
channels open 24/7. Now anytime I read about some company using IRC, I get
really excited. And every time I use a web-based product that is basically an
inferior replacement for IRC, it drives me crazy.

The most disappointing thing is that IRC is _still_ awesome and bots make it
infinitely more useful than a webapp could ever be. Unless I can setup
_Campfire_ bots or something.

~~~
xelfer
I've always thought of Twitter as a crap implementation of IRC. It's like
they're trying to do something which IRC has been able to do for so long. I
think this article sums it up: <http://stubblog.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/how-
to-fix-twitter/> \- though the point of people using it is valid. The IRC
network I maintain peaked at around 5000 users about 6 years ago, now its down
to 700.

~~~
gcv
Twitter _is_ a weak reimplementation of IRC. For that matter, instant
messaging in general, from AIM to Jabber, is a weak reimplementation of IRC.
It took years for these chat protocols to get features like rooms and direct-
client chats and file transfers. It would have been better to slightly extend
the IRC protocol to support the handful of things these services offer (SMS
delivery and off-line message stores).

In the same vein, all forum software is a weak reimplementation of Usenet. Not
distributed, no killfiles, can't pick your own client interface, can't make
your own groups.

I learned a valuable lesson when I watched AIM use explode in high school. I
realized that non-geeks started using a crappy chat interface because it was
well marketed and ubiquitous (AOL and AIM). The same thing happens with many
inferior technologies. Java is an extremely weak reimplementation of some most
fundamental semantics of Lisp (such as garbage collection), and, thanks to
marketing, became exceedingly popular. Twitter is the same thing (except I
still don't see non-geeks using it).

~~~
bonaldi
Don't write usability off as "marketing". AIM presented a usable way to do
chat for people who had no idea when IRC was a command-line confus-atron.

~~~
jrp
In this case it was really the adopters though. mIRC for instance was as
usable as AIM.

------
matthew-wegner
We've played around with a few different notification systems at
Flashbang/Blurst. It started with our scrolling LED sign, which would display
commits along with text-to-speech on the office speakers (video:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJer51_DoFc>).

Over time, though, we started putting more and more stuff into Growl. We get
Growl--via the network stuff--for all kinds of things now. This lets people
configure it how they want, disable projects they don't care about (each
project shows up independently in Growl), and isn't as disruptive all of the
time.

We also use a Google Talk conference bot running an account on our Google
Apps, powered by: <http://coders.meta.net.nz/~perry/jabber/confbot.php> . If
we had the bot running first we would've probably used that rather than Growl.

We still use the sign for some fun things--we had it doing real-time sales
notification of our iPhone games (which talk back to our server), but that
became too distracting too quickly. For parties we turn on a webcam and let
people type messages into it.

Long comment short, if you don't have real-time notification of source control
commits and things--even if you're in the same room--you're missing out on
something very useful.

~~~
jodrellblank
Re: your youtube video... I've put up LED signs at work before, but they
suffer the problems that:

(a) you need to look at it. Mental polling.

(b) It can show a small amount of text. There is little summary information
(that we deal with) which benefits. Either boolean data that could be shown
with a single light or lots of data that needs more space. Is it really
useful, or more of a novelty?

Also, isn't the text-to-speech somewhat interrupting?

------
c3o
At Soup we use Jabber in a similar way: A group chatroom that everyone hangs
out in, and a bot (based on Whistle: <http://whistle.rubyforge.org> ) that
notifies us of GetSatisfaction requests, emails, commits & deploys and user
signups (in batches, to not be too spammy).

~~~
llimllib
same at my company... we just use xmpp4r and a git post-commit hook.

It also sends quotes from the quoteboard to our chat at 10, 12, and 2 :)

------
mcxx
It is a pity IRC is so widely underestimated. I like seeing every utilisation
like this.

~~~
axod
There are countless websites and communities using IRC that you may not
realize is IRC. The old big networks are still dying off, quakenet etc, but
there's a big surge of growth from smaller networks. Freenode, oftc,

The thing is, IRC is tried and tested. IRC has developed ways to combat spam,
abuse, irritating kids, etc etc. That's one of the things that makes it more
attractive than any new solution. And of course it's easy to write bots for.

I know I'm biased, but I expect IRC to have a real surge of growth the next
year or 2, and take over somewhat from other less immediate forms of
communication.

Massive growth from video streaming/chat sites - ustream, justin.tv, things
are only going to get more real time interactive, and people are likely to go
with IRC.

~~~
jonursenbach
If people are likely to go with IRC in the future, they're not going to know
that they're on IRC. It's going to be some webbed up interface. I've met
countless people who think "nerd" or "geek" when hearing the word IRC because
it's all text and no pictures, so the only way to actually get them on it is
with a pretty interface.

Personally, I see Jabber having real growth within the next 2 years due to
GTalk, Facebook Chat and MyspaceIM. And as with IRC having a pretty interface,
a multitude of people using these means of communication have no idea they're
actually on a Jabber server.

Go figure.

~~~
suttree
That's exactly what we were thinking when we added 'chat' to PMOG. It's a well
developed standard and, given a suitable simple interface, most people won't
even know theyre on an IRC server. Plus, it's realtime, lightweight, hackable,
etc, etc.

------
gcv
This is cool if only because I learned about netcat. I can't believe I never
knew about it before and always relied on "telnet <somehost> <someport>" to do
this.

------
daleharvey
We use jabber for much of the same, find it quite strange that xmpp is not
more widely used than it is, but can see that changing soon

~~~
axod
One of the main reasons IMHO is that it's a ridiculously over complicated
horrible badly designed hideous protocol, which was designed by committee
rather than organically grown.

Writing a bot for XMPP isn't a simple matter of sending a few plain text
commands. It's an absolute nightmare. It's so verbose and overcomplicated it's
just not funny any more.

(I'm currently working on XMPP support in Mibbit, and writing the protocol lib
myself so the pain is still raw).

~~~
daleharvey
the protocol is certainly verbose, but it isnt very complicated. the
verboseness comes with a lot of extra functionality

~~~
axod
Here is the login procedure:

    
    
      * Send out some xml spam to "create a stream"
      * Receive a stream reply, with feature sets.
      * Send out starttls
      * Get a reply back
      * Switch to secure mode
      * Send out some xml spam to "create a stream" inside the first stream
      * Receive reply back, check supported auth modes
      * Send out auth
      * Receive reply back
      * Send out some *MORE* xml spam to "create a stream" inside the first 2
      * Receive reply back, with features
      * Bind
      * Create session
    

_THEN_ you can do something useful. Most of the verboseness is idiotic XML:

eg <proceed xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-tls"/>

Those xmlns's are everywhere, and are stupidly verbose.

You can write IRC commands by hand into telnet. But typing in xml is just not
feasable since it's so stupidly verbose.

~~~
daleharvey
yeh its too much to be typing into a telnet session, but the extra
functionality like being distributed, offline storage, out of band messaging
can be very very useful.

irc works great as a chat protocol, xmpp is more viable as a generic messaging
protocol

~~~
teej
Simplicity and ease of access to a protocol is -key- in widespread adoption.
This is why REST-like APIs are so popular - you can write a quick script in
practically any language, you can test it on the command line with a quick
CURL, or you can simply boot up a web browser and try it out.

------
calbers
We used Skype on one of my teams. It worked well. The ability to retain the
history of the chat was the selling point, and the ease of calling someone up
was the another. Problem on my (linux skype client at least) was exporting the
chat history to a file.

------
petercooper
What does the -q0 option on nc do? Neither Linux or OS X appear to have this
option available.

~~~
twopoint718
Shows up on mine (Linux):

-q [seconds] after EOF on stdin, wait the specified number of seconds and then quit.

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sam_in_nyc
The way he describes his implementation sounds like a digital Utopia. A live
scrolling feed of topics people care about, with the ability to look things up
from the past.

Twitter is definitely a simplification of this concept: You get your own
channel to post into. And you also get to choose which other channels to merge
together into one mega-channel that you read. Hashtags can send your posts to
other "meta channels" defined by the community. Search basically makes each
word in a post go to a channel defined by that word. It's all quite simple and
beautiful, and stoneage.

------
jodrellblank
I wonder how they find IRC useful - doesn't it suffer from the same problems
as tracking any other IRC channel?

Information you care about will be pushed off screen, if you set markers it
will be as interrupting as any other popup and alternatively requires manual
polling...

------
swombat
We actually use a Skype Chat for this. Why? Because it's persistent, which IRC
isn't...

We used Campfire for a while, but it was not as good as Skype Chat (and it
caused my Firefox to crash in a way such that I had to reboot my Mac to get it
working again).

------
zandorg
Audioscrobbler made sense, but now I look at Last.fm, search for bands that
were quite popular there in 2006, but now are in the low single digits of
playbacks. I think Last.fm has lost the plot, no matter how many gigabytes its
market cap is.

~~~
jonursenbach
You don't think that's just because people have moved on to something else?
Seasons change, feelings change.

