Long live IRC!
TL;DR Version
Gitter is now available on 6667.
Verbose
We love chat. As individuals, we've been using it in various forms since the 90's. Yet something didn't feel right. Sure you can hack together various bots and scripts to get a richer experience. Or someone else can build that for you and you can spend that time making other awesome things.
So we built Gitter.
Gitter is chat for people who build software. Be that developers, designers, product people, whoever.
Built on top of GitHub, Gitter allows public and private chat rooms for organisations and repositories. Already we've got a number of businesses and open source communities running their chat rooms on Gitter. It features infinite chat history, integrated issue mentions, markdown in chat, syntax highlighting for code snippets and activity feeds from GitHub, Trello, Jenkins, Travis, Huboard and more.
Gittter is available as a web app and a Mac App, but obviously there are numerous people, ourselves included, who use IRC daily. So we built an IRC bridge into Gitter. Now you can use Adium, ircII, Colloquy or whatever weapon you choose and easily connect to Gitter.
The service has been tested for the last few weeks and we would love some further testing and feedback.
We welcome you to visit https://irc.gitter.im and give it a go.
Shout outs
Big thanks to Alex Young for his wonderful Node ircd.js as well as all the contributors on the project.
Thanks to all the people who helped us test the initial launch of IRC. With your help we found a killed a few bugs.