I can't believe the level of ignorance among people these days...

To use IRC, all you need to do is know the commands. It's no different than those "cheat consoles" that are so popular. And once you get your nickname registered, there is no need to ever use an IRC command, save for maybe /join, /quit and /leave, all of which are very self explanatory. It's not like registering your nickname is very hard, either. On Rizon, all you need do is type /ns register PASSWORD EMAIL. Then an EMail is sent to EMAIL with a link to click. Click it and your nick is registered though. You don't even have to register your nick though.

If you use QChat, everything's done for you. All you need do is just type in what your name should be, and click Join. And if you ask me, even QChat is easier to use than TinyChat. The only thing IRC lacks in comparison to TinyChat is webcam support; in other words, IRC is less of a strain on bandwidth. =p

IRC is old, yes. But so is HTML; so is C; so is E-Mail; so is TV; so is MSN; The list goes on. If "old" technology is still in widespread usage today, doesn't that mean it's good to a certain extent? And besides, IRC is just a protocol, rather than a proprietary POS. Thus, the creator of the client can make its usage as user friendly as they want to. I could make a client right now that would coddle you during the entire process, giving a nice GUI, and room browser, etc. Or I could just expose you to the raw I/O and expect you to look at and send messages like *!*@123.sesame.street~ privmsg #eeforum: Hello.

Trust me; there's nothing wrong or hard to use with IRC. It's the users that are unwilling to use something they never heard of before, or something that sounds too old or techie.