And what percentage of the IRC users are outside say, the US?
My best guess would be far more than half of them. On QuakeNet for example, about 95%.
And how many of the people in the US are either at work or commuting?
How many people in Europe just went to bed?
My point was, there are nearly half a million people on 9 networks that are currently online .. sure looks like IRC is dying to me.
I'm sure that at some point in time, half a million people were using horse carriages. If you want to focus on whether something is dying, a single number tells you nothing. Trends do. For example,
irc.netsplit.de has such trends and these show that the number of IRC users has slowly but surely been declining over the past few years. Yes, in absolute numbers there are still a lot of IRC users, but I'm sure the part of the OP's idea was that
if something is to be done to stop that decline, it should be done sooner rather than later.
