#nsit @ Freenode

You can find me on IRC at #nsit channel usually with the nickname “deepank” (yea yea I could not think of a better creative name!). Now, why this sudden urge to start a new channel at IRC for the college. Well first of all, its not my idea, it was Mohit’s idea originally and I brushed it aside that time.

This is how my thought process went : who wants to come to chat on IRC when there are many better chat clients available like Google Talk. But then I thought: hey there is one feature that Google Talk does not have. And the feature is: Chatrooms or channels. At IRC, a channel might contain hundreds of members who can all chat simultaneously on a single window. If you have never been on a noisy IRC Channel before, you might think that it will be hodge-podge, believe me it is not! Humans have a beautiful ability to self-organize when left on their own devices.

But this was not the only motive behind starting up with the IRC Channel. IRC has the unique marketing appeal of being geeky. It has been made hard to use with the lack of good IM Clients. Nearly all of them require you to learn to use commands, and using commands in today’s user-interface crazy world is a sure shot way of advertising that you are geeky :)

So, I believe that the new IRC Channel will attract all the programmers and geeks of the college. It will not have 100s of members, rather a very small following of 4-5 people at best. In the past two days, its membership has not gone past 5. But, I believe that the membership will rise slowly and steadily to over 10-20 people in 2-3 years.

The channel is here to stay… and I would love to hear back in comments.