How we use IRC at Last.fm

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.<p>The most disappointing thing is that IRC is <i>still</i> awesome and bots make it infinitely more useful than a webapp could ever be. Unless I can setup <i>Campfire</i> bots or something.

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: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJer51_DoFc" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJer51_DoFc</a>).<p>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.<p>We also use a Google Talk conference bot running an account on our Google Apps, powered by: <a href="http://coders.meta.net.nz/~perry/jabber/confbot.php" rel="nofollow">http://coders.meta.net.nz/~perry/jabber/confbot.php</a> . If we had the bot running first we would've probably used that rather than Growl.<p>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.<p>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.

At Soup we use Jabber in a similar way: A group chatroom that everyone hangs out in, and a bot (based on Whistle: <a href="http://whistle.rubyforge.org" rel="nofollow">http://whistle.rubyforge.org</a> ) that notifies us of GetSatisfaction requests, emails, commits &#38; deploys and user signups (in batches, to not be too spammy).

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

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 &#60;somehost&#62; &#60;someport&#62;" to do this.

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

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.

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

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.<p>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.

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

We actually use a Skype Chat for this. Why? Because it's persistent, which IRC isn't...<p>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).

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.