Comment by Jizzle

In many ways, the idea of IRC chat has grown significantly beyond the conventional client. From the ubiquity of chat for productivity in applications like HipChat to the hugely successful Twitch.tv platform, IRC has proven to be a viable backbone in these scenarios. It's quite nice then to see a concerted standardization effort. Hopefully, many of the proprietary features we might recognize today will be widespread and freely available in the future.