The suggested 'services' were just examples. I *Strongly* feel that if IRC were more closely tied to other protocols (particularly HTTP) we'd see some kind of renewed interest.
People nowdays seems to like the idea of an integrated brower + email client (mozilla or opera or many many others), and if IRC clients/servers started to branch out a little I FEEL that we'd see a bit of renewed interest.
As for "isn't dying", the survey only made me sit abck and take stock of things. 4-5 years ago, before IM's really existed at all, I remember setting all of my friends on to mirc and teaching them the ins and outs of it.
For a while everyone loved it, and could use it. Then, about 6 months ago I started going "do you go on IRC" to people I knew...
The responses were more or less "what's IRC?"
Of course it's been dying for the last 5 years, just doing it slowly.
Watchdog + Myself chat(ted) on the Telstra bigpond server. They made a few poor choices (and they were nazi's about all sorts of stupid things), had a tightly controlled server and so on so forth.
One day they cut off mirc users from the larger youth channels, and the ratings dropped. They've never returned really. Where I used to be able to talk to upwards of 80 different strangers every minute, now I'm stuck with 7 boring people who type "I'm bored" every few minutes.
No onion hey? Maybe its a conspiracy... Say, did you walk down Rundle Mall? 'cause if you did, then you probably walked within 50m of my house.
