Connection reset by peer? That damn peer will get you every time. I first found IRC, also known as Internet Relay Chat back in the 90’s when I was a kid. It was a website I stumbled upon while searching the great sites of their time such as HotBot, Yahoo!, and AOL. They used a simple java applet to connect the web page to a chat room and once I logged on, an addiction was born that lasted for more than a decade.
I’m cured now. Free from the constant urge to check my messages and see who’s online. The social world of the web has changed a lot. Back when IRC was still “cool” there weren’t such websites as MySpace, Facebook, etc. The closest thing you could get to a “social network” was Yahoo! Games which was written entirely in java and still is as I write this — painfully slow and flawed. Can you imagine a world without your MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook? Back then, you’d find mostly, well, AOL users on AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). ICQ was pretty popular back then before it was bought out by the above mentioned “running man.”
I did a lot of work for IRC in general back in the day. I ran my own servers, toyed around with different “services” and protocols. Encryption, SSL, web-based, you name it. I even helped a couple of people out in writing some code that’s still in place today on networks like EFnet. Built by geeks, ran by geeks, and unfortunately filled with nothing but geeks.
To who do we owe IRC’s death? Go check out my Facebook page and I’ll tell you. Social networking websites that we know today completely killed a slow, flawed, and dated chat protocol that is still in place today. Run by geeks, for geeks. Ask your teenage daughter if she chats on IRC and she’ll probably ignore you, wondering how her parents knew about something that goes by an acronym that she didn’t know about.
As time went on, IRC just became less and less important. MySpace is on my computer, on my phone, and soon the big social networking websites are going to plug directly into your television. Why do I need an old, out-dated plain text chat system to keep me informed? Now instead of saying “message me” I can be tweeted, Facebooked, MySpaced, and share my life on websites that have no real names, like Flickr. What has the Internet become?
