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5. Replaces a perfectly good, pre-existing protocol, when there's absolutely no sane reason (other than the aforementioned commercialism, of course) to do so? Check.

It's actually XMPP under the hood, which has been around for a few years before Google started getting excited about it. XMPP's jabber application has a number of advantages over IRC (notably the encoding of metadata is nowhere near as horrific) but that's hardly the only use for it.

Doesn't make any sense as a replacement for email though. Maybe as a way to replace POP or IMAP, but SMTP? The advantage of SMTP is its universality (yeah, even Exchange and Notes allegedly...) which means it is great when you need to communicate with someone who is using a different software stack to you.

Now along comes wave. Google Wave is basically email on steroids, with a "wall / real time web" capability thrown in. You can be totally private or you can be totally public or any combo in between. Nice. And oh yes you also get media richness.

1. XML-based protocol? Check.
2. Obfuscated? Check.
3. Needlessly complex? Check.
4. Proprietary/commercially based? Check. (The better to "de-commoditise protocols," my dear)

5. Replaces a perfectly good, pre-existing protocol, when there's absolutely no sane reason (other than the aforementioned commercialism, of course) to do so? Check.

6. (The icing on the cake; this one ALWAYS shows up) Uses the brainless, meaningless, totally subjective, rage-inducing, corporate-suit-spawned "richness," argument in order to sell it to people who don't have the necessary intelligence to be able to see through this crap? Check.

Go ahead, call me a troll, mod me down, accuse me of beating up Santa Claus at Christmas, etc. I'm saying stuff you won't want to hear. If there's one thing that is a truly unforgiveable sin around here, it's voicing unpopular opinions.

Although in a smaller scale, it already happened once: The Great IRC split. Once a single more or less decentralized network (just like the web now), disagreements on the policies lead to a transatlantic split. Hope that never happens on the WWW.

...and then no one bothers to write an updated RFC?

Sure they did, and corrected some of the errors in the original, but those aren't entirely accurate either. This very helpful draft, which defines how a server can declare precisely how it violates the RFCs or specifying details the RFCs don't cover, was never accepted as an RFC by the IETF. I'm aware of no such document on how to handle colors, which is just a de-facto standard that the mIRC client made up (and has some rather glaring problems) that other clients have to emulate for compatibility.

(Supporting colors is important even for a bot that will never use them, because you have to parse the syntax so you can correctly strip color codes out of messages from other users. The CASEMAPPING parameter defined for the ISUPPORT message is important so you can track whether messages about a user "foo{}" entering the channel and user "foo[]" leaving the channel are talking about the same user or not, otherwise you have no idea how many people are really there. CHANMODES is an enormous pain in the ass to deal with, and if it's not specified via ISUPPORT you just have to guess and hope you can parse it correctly. The list goes on.)

*cough*
*cough*
*cough*

*COUGH*

Excuse me, bullshit make me cough.

Yeah, IRC was first deployed around 1988. Remember thinking at the time that it was an iffy implementation of a weak idea (relaying). Never would have guessed that it would take over the world to the extent that it did.

IRC is actually even older than that and it was invented by a fellow called Jarkko Oikarinen in University of Oulu in Finland in August 1988. Read about it here. First servers that formed the the original IRC network are still online participating the IRCnet network.

Kazaa is used to distribute copyrighted material, no-one is disputing that. But why should the creators of Kazaa be responsible for that? Kazaa can be used for legal purposes as well. Are car-makers liable if their cars are used for hit 'n run? Are knife-makers liable if their product is used to kill someone? IRC is also used to trade pirated material, should the police be raiding the home of Jarkko Oikarinen since he happened to invent it?

Ok, ill bite..
Whos the 1% of the population who 20 years
ago would of gone 'hur'?

Ill give you a hint,
they would of been wearing striaght jackets,
and talking about the future :P

History of IRC

Hairy Kissmoose and a Shinny New Deer.

I'm not sure server whitelists are the way to go either. I don't think it's worked out all that well for IRC.

If I had the time, inclination, and mandate, I would set up some sort of interface so that users could opt into server side black/whitelists (think TCP wrappers) so that spam could be rejected as it tries to come into the server rather than as it passes to the client via POP. Create a web interface so users can maintain their lists, and store them in a mysql table. Write a little perl to validate the from: against the black/whitelist during the initial SMTP conversation, and Bob's your uncle.

It is my feeling from years of dealing with SMTP, POP and SPAM issues that SMTP is basically unfixable due to the fact that changes to the standard that could be used control spam would require almost instantaneous universal adoption. Any attempts at maintaining backward compatibility, by their very nature, would leave gaping holes for spammers to crawl through.

The trouble is, even if you build a magical new standard for mail transport and delivery that solves the spam problem, you have to somehow convince the world to phase out SMTP. Maybe the promise of a spam free internet would be motivation enough, but somehow I doubt it.