It could be that mIRC is #1 because mIRC is #1, if that makes sense. Even if other clients were lightyears ahead of mIRC now, it takes a lot to make people switch.
My reference to it being #1 isn't the number of users. If the other main clients look at mIRC to see what to add, then those clients are proving mIRC's #1... not by number of users, but simply by trying to live up to it. You don't try to be the same as something that's not any good.
I disagree. Emoticons are mainly aesthetic, I'll give you that one, but they're also useful for showing the context you want your message to be taken in. Since there are lots of people on lots of different wavelengths on message boards and chat rooms, a joke may not always be taken as a joke, for example, but with a laughing or smiling icon it hints that you're not being serious. The same could be used to show anger, sadness, confusion, etc.
I'm unsure of how a text smile isn't good enough to show that same thing. Most people using the internet (other than brand new users) understand at least the basic text smileys. As I said earlier, I do like the idea of being able to replace any text with any image through scripting. That would be useful rather than just aesthetic and could make for some very interesting scripts. It would also allow for emoticons to exist. That is a way to add functionality to the emoticon idea so that it's worth doing for reasons that are not aesthetic.
I was always under the impression that a large portion of IRC used English. When I say large, I mean more in the region of 70-80%, not a mere 60%. I could be wrong though.
A large number to *use* English because that's the easiest method up until now. Now that we have UTF8, more and more are using that so they can talk in their own languages. Maybe I am wrong at the percent as well, but I still think that we have at least about 50% of users who are not from the United States or England or other countries that have English as a primary language. Of course, I guess that many languages do work with English characters, so that you don't need UTF8, so maybe it is a lower percent that actually use it. Still, I do believe it's a very important feature to a very large number of people.
Whereas you say it's fading out of existence, I think it's as popular as ever. I see tons of people using or discussing webcam every day. I guess it depends on the sort of communities you use, but I see them widely used in social networking ones (like myspace, etc).
Well, that isn't really an instant communication site... it is closer to a forum/e-mail communication site. Still, I admit that I may be wrong about the number using webcams for actual live video communication. The point I was making is that other similar instant communication software (such as IM) that has the ability to use video/voice don't have a large percentage of people actually using it.
Anyhow, without real researched data, we don't really know how popular it will be 6 months or a year after it was made available. I still think the percentage of mIRC users who use it regularly after 6 months to a year will be under 5%. I can't prove that and won't put in the time and effort to research it to find out who is right. I'm just stating my thoughts on what I feel will happen.
