IRC, substitute for Babble?

Last lecture mentioned "Babble", a CMC-prototype by Erickson et al [1]. I found it to be interesting concept and decided to read the paper about it. I found out that many features it has somehow bring IRC into mind.

Users list and private chats are quite self-explanatory so I won't go deeper into them. Different topics in Babble are almost the same as channels in IRC, and "Get Info"-fuctionality in Babble seems to give almost the same information as /whois in IRC. "The spot" in Babble is functionality commonly found in IRC-clients, althought instead of having separate windows for it, they usually just flash their minimized window when something happens in a channel.

Of course, one key feature of Babble is missing from IRC: the Social Proxy.
You could mimic it somehow by using idle-information from /whois, but it wouldn't be the same as Babble's Social Proxy. Interesting visualization-idea for IRC nevertheless.

The paper also mentioned that users of Babble expressed concern about unwanted visitors joining in Babble. This problem could be solved in IRC by using password protected channels for sensitive topics.

Persistence of conversations was one merit of Babble mentioned in paper and this could be achieved in IRC by using screen to run your client. That way you can read the conversations that happened when you weren't there.


References:

[1]Erickson, T., Smith, D.N., Kellogg, W.A., Laff, M.R., Richards, J.T. , and Bradner, E. (1999). "Socially translucent systems: Social proxies, persistent conversation, and the design of 'Babble'," Proceedings of CHI '99 (Pittsburgh, PA May 15-20), ACM, New York.