If i remember right someone was working on a version 3 of IRC protocol. Personaly, I like the text based style. I like the fact that people dont really know about IRC as well. Its a true escape from the world sometimes. You can actually make a whiteboard in mIRC, my friend had a working one somewhere, it went between groups you could join a channel and open it with everyone who was in the channel and who had the script it was pretty neat. Anyway, I personaly think IRC is fine the way it is, with the text based life. MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ, are all getting really bloated up with features no one cares about. Kind of another reason to like google talk more. (atleast the beta version of google talk.) Some people i'm sure would love to see IRC jump into new levels and to new areas, but there are things like teamspeak already out there. I guess maybe i'm kind of conservitive in that IRC sense, but i really like the plain text based part of it. I hope mIRC doesnt go all bloaty like IceChat, and some of the other clients out there.
By the way it was Andrew Church, he created an IRCd of some sort,
http://achurch.org/irc3/ his protocol layout there. Its very old and non-updated.
