Everyone has an email address. I know only three or four people who have even used IRC since 2000, typically for developers on open source product chat rooms like Drupal.
Whatever the pros and cons of the technology, or the whys and wherefores of the reason for this lack of widespread use, it clearly has not been adopted by the mainstream. If the goal of a protocol is to be used widely, then clearly IRC has failed.
IRC usage stats are really bad. Steady decline from 1 million users in 2003 to 400k in 2012. In a time where we're talking about communication apps with hundreds of millions of users, not even having a million is pretty telling to me.
Unfortunately, while most/all of the tech folks hang out on IRC, it's much less used by a lot of the marketing/business people I deal with. I should use it more routinely myself but the fact is that it's not that widely used by some groups.
Earlier in this thread you estimate that GTalk and Facebook have 10% of the instant messaging market. Does IRC have more users than 10% of the instant messaging market?
IRC still has a huge foothold in dev/geek communities. Email is something I use every single day for communication and business. Maybe there's more you'd like to explain but if I'm to just taking this at face value, I have to say you're horribly wrong.
I'm curious how many people in the real world actually use IRC. Find 10 people on the streets of New York and statistically zero use IRC and maybe, maybe 1 has even heard of it. Ask those same 10 people if they've heard of WhatsApp and likely 3 or 4 would have heard of it and probably 2 would have it on their device. If they're from outside the US, that number would go up to likely 7 would have it installed. Ask those same 10 people if they've ever heard of Skype and all 10 would say yes and likely 8 of them have used it.
Obviously this isn't scientific, but the point is that most people don't use IRC. I'm a software dev and I don't use IRC and I've never had a real-world non-dev even mention it. But Skype? I'm forced to use that every day. Text messages? With iMessage, it's great, but you also need to have the person's phone number -- or, you're like me and you're moving around a lot and change numbers fairly frequently, but Skype/iMessage/etc stays pretty consistent year after year.
Just my 2 cents. In terms of "always on intrusiveness" isn't SMS always on? Unless you're using a burner phone, you're being tracked, SMS is always logged, there's no illusion of security.
Besides, who the heck buys a phone is Hangouts imbedded in ROM? If you're interested in security, then I'd suggest getting something other than Android.
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