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Comment by wtracy | Hacker News Reader

The only advantages this seems to have over IRC is the ability to embed images and videos. Am I missing something?

I've not used it, but generally an advantage with these sort of things is an easy and simple way to have persistent connections, and history without having to setup a crappy bouncer and deal with it's set of problems.

At the company I work at we decided against IRC because of possible difficulties for non-technical employees. Currently we're using XMPP but we're considering other solutions.

What's preventing non-technical employees from jumping aboard on IRC? There's a web client and desktop clients are fairly simple to set up.

The big advantage I see to IRC is how long it's been around. Plenty of clients and setups catering to IRC. And it's not going away anytime soon. Perhaps it's getting a little long in the tooth, as posed by moe at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810

Presumably it automatically saves the history for everyone as well and you don't need an IRC client (just a web browser). Also authentication into the room by default.

I've always wondered why is this not a client's responsibility? There must exist a good IRC client that can recognize links. From there, it can fetch videos and embed images.

LimeChat does. Previews images and Youtube videos, also Adium has a plugin for Youtube.

I have too much free time.

Apart from LimeChat, Textual on OS X does that too - but you've been warned, sometimes there are things pasted you just don't want to see ;)

Colloquy and Linkinus will automatically expand images.

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