Comment by IgorPartola

Last I tried HipChat, it was a terrible experience simply because I wanted to not run yet another application and instead use Adium. They do support XMPP but to get it working you have to do magic. After I did the magic, I had chat up and running but lo and behold: file transfers did not work. Thankfully, this is when our team decided the experiment was over. We went back to using IRC. What fundamental problem do these new chat protocols solve that are not already addressed by IRC and XMPP?