There's IM the one-to-one communication, and there's IM the multi-user chat. Those are two different concepts, they have their own mechanics of working and are treated differently by society.
But since you brought it up, let's talk about IRC. I'm betting its lack of widespread success is because of the general UX combined with some historical mishaps.
There are things you need to think about when IRCing, like:
that all boil down to a. thinking, b. learning, and c. typing magic incantation into a command prompt. It all gives off this complicated, "techie" vibe.
Remember that the general population can't use a computer [0]. That level of involvement is already too much for people to start using it without a strong reason to do so.
I remember when I started IRCing for the first time. There was another solution, that captured much more users - the web chats. Those ugly, scammy looking Java applets embedded on news portals. They solved all the above problems, i.e. you didn't care about "servers" or "connecting", all channels ("rooms", they were called) were listed on a website and there were no magic modes or something, just users, administrators and kicking (and you as an user had only to grok what "being kicked/banned" means).
And of course you could post rainbows and cat gifs and animated faces made by a crazy artist on drugs.
Chats ultimately mostly died, having gained the (deserved) reputation of scammy and ugly places. Or maybe because society still thinks that talking with random strangers on the Internet is something weird and/or dangerous, I don't know.
Anyway, back to the topic of technological obstacles. At my local Hackerspace, every now and then we invite people to our IRC channel, and sometimes those people are not exactly of computer-competent type. A good way to do this is to point a person to a IRC web frame, that is pre-configured with server and channel names. From his point of view, it's just like entering that old-school chat, except that it looks less crappy. After that person hangs out a bit with us and likes the place, we teach him how to install and configure a best-suited IRC client.
If the IRC is ever to reach popularity again, I think someone needs to build a, pardon the startupy meme, GMail of IRC. That is, an UI that looks good, hides complexity from you. An UI that lets you click through everything, and explains things like "+v", "@", "-c" or "NickServ" in human-readable terms. With icons and colors and simple sentences.
Then there's the marketing angle, but I bet you, if Google ever built an IRC client for massess, we'd see a great resurgence of this protocol
Relay.js is a user friendly IRC client, see http://relayjs.jit.su/ for a demo. Converse.js (https://conversejs.org/) is an XMPP web client that supports XMPP conference rooms. So I'd say we already have good, nice-looking clients and there's room for improving integration on a single service to reach for the masses.
Unfortunately, Relay.js seems to not support colors in IRC, i.e. the "^C3i'm green^C" mIRC encoding. But it looks sweet though, and if one could just skip the "type the server and channel name" (i.e. embed on a community website), it would pretty much mimic the chat experience, only better :).
Anyway, so even if we have examples of pretty, somewhat simple and good enough XMPP/IRC clients, the next step is to get them to the world at large. That pretty much leaves marketing to focus on.
EDIT:
Somebody should bundle a pre-configured IRC server and a webserver hosting Relay.js into a Docker/Sandstorm (https://sandstorm.io/) container set and give it/sell it to companies as "awesome internal collaboration facilitator that improves communication and helps empower the teams to build products for the next generation of the web", or sth.
But since you brought it up, let's talk about IRC. I'm betting its lack of widespread success is because of the general UX combined with some historical mishaps.
There are things you need to think about when IRCing, like:
that all boil down to a. thinking, b. learning, and c. typing magic incantation into a command prompt. It all gives off this complicated, "techie" vibe.Remember that the general population can't use a computer [0]. That level of involvement is already too much for people to start using it without a strong reason to do so.
I remember when I started IRCing for the first time. There was another solution, that captured much more users - the web chats. Those ugly, scammy looking Java applets embedded on news portals. They solved all the above problems, i.e. you didn't care about "servers" or "connecting", all channels ("rooms", they were called) were listed on a website and there were no magic modes or something, just users, administrators and kicking (and you as an user had only to grok what "being kicked/banned" means).
And of course you could post rainbows and cat gifs and animated faces made by a crazy artist on drugs.
Chats ultimately mostly died, having gained the (deserved) reputation of scammy and ugly places. Or maybe because society still thinks that talking with random strangers on the Internet is something weird and/or dangerous, I don't know.
Anyway, back to the topic of technological obstacles. At my local Hackerspace, every now and then we invite people to our IRC channel, and sometimes those people are not exactly of computer-competent type. A good way to do this is to point a person to a IRC web frame, that is pre-configured with server and channel names. From his point of view, it's just like entering that old-school chat, except that it looks less crappy. After that person hangs out a bit with us and likes the place, we teach him how to install and configure a best-suited IRC client.
If the IRC is ever to reach popularity again, I think someone needs to build a, pardon the startupy meme, GMail of IRC. That is, an UI that looks good, hides complexity from you. An UI that lets you click through everything, and explains things like "+v", "@", "-c" or "NickServ" in human-readable terms. With icons and colors and simple sentences.
Then there's the marketing angle, but I bet you, if Google ever built an IRC client for massess, we'd see a great resurgence of this protocol
[0] - http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-comput...