I have never been able to "get" IRC. I've tried to like it a number of times, but it always ends up as nothing but a distraction.
My experience: start a client, join a channel, and watch it go. Meanwhile, try to get work done. I'm either watching IRC in case something interesting goes by (and then not working), or I'm working and then miss whatever was interesting on IRC. Or I try to do both and accomplish neither.
To me, IRC feels exactly like those twitter update widgets that people put on their blogs. I usually end up opening a terminal window and putting it over the widget, otherwise it distracts me like a "look at me!" advertisement.
I get much better value and results from googling; someone has always had whatever problem I'm trying to solve, and if I can't figure it out on my own, I can usually find a thread where someone else has.
I'm not complaining, and I'm not saying IRC has no value (to others). I sometimes wonder if I'm doing it wrong, but I think IRC, among many other things, is just not for me.
In certain help channels, for complicated questions, you would be amazed with the quality of the responses you get from people just hanging out in channel. Being able to paste code and work with someone in real time to troubleshoot bugs has saved my bacon probably hundreds of times by now. Great examples of this are #jquery, #postgresql and #perl on freenode.
Yeah, twitter is actually one of the closest things to IRC imho. The key of enjoying it is to learn enjoy the moment. Keep it minimized in the background, or on a other desktop or something, and check it out occasionally to see if there is anything interesting going on at the moment. If not, then proceed doing whatever.
My experience: start a client, join a channel, and watch it go. Meanwhile, try to get work done. I'm either watching IRC in case something interesting goes by (and then not working), or I'm working and then miss whatever was interesting on IRC. Or I try to do both and accomplish neither.
To me, IRC feels exactly like those twitter update widgets that people put on their blogs. I usually end up opening a terminal window and putting it over the widget, otherwise it distracts me like a "look at me!" advertisement.
I get much better value and results from googling; someone has always had whatever problem I'm trying to solve, and if I can't figure it out on my own, I can usually find a thread where someone else has.
I'm not complaining, and I'm not saying IRC has no value (to others). I sometimes wonder if I'm doing it wrong, but I think IRC, among many other things, is just not for me.