Has IRC-Galleria growth hit a wall?

I have to agree with Jon. My childhood friends and I (born between 80-84) have all moved from irc-galleria to facebook. We all have accounts in irc-galleria, but no-one uses them actively and no-one has paid account anymore). I would love to know where you get this "almost certainly delete their accounts". Is there something good data behind this or is it just a feeling? Does irc.fi remove unactive accounts?

I have been amazed how little irc.fi has evolved. There is no videos, no audio, no real band accounts... I have waited something big from there for years, but have seen nothing.. just more and more paid advertising profiles and stuff like that. I think irc-galleria has already lost it globally (probably years ago), and they are starting to lose it here in finland too...

How has irc.fi taken of globally? I remember seeing some local versions (if I remember correctly: rus, estonia, germany...), but has any of those gained reasonable user base?

It started as a profile gallery for IRC(Internet Relay Chat) users which it still is to this day, but after few years it added this "mainstream" on the side (which became the main population of users).

Problem homever is that IRC-Galleria has always had the IRC on it's name and in it's conscept. Even IRC users are active users and the first to use the service, they're not a huge and profitable democraphic. I belive that focus on keeping things "IRC" is constantly enchanched by founders and management (oldschool irc users).

This has led to it that the product itself is just a profile gallery and sucks in other aspects. It annoying to use and is fallen of the current developments of social and web services. There is almost nothing to do(one gets tired of just commenting friends pretty quickly), and current design and most of the features has been in place like 5years or something.

I really don't see a single reason why would someone use IRC-Galleria over Facebook as their general social service.

Back in the day when it was launched, it was fun. All were actual IRC-users and so on. Nowadays, not so much. A lot of actual IRC users have deleted their accounts and the rest that are there don't really seem to do much.

IRC Galleria for me was always about commenting people's pictures. The blogs, notes etc. seemed a bit useless and usability-wise I've had a bit of an issue wrapping my finger around what the site offers. The discussions are hard to follow since there's no threading or any kind of structure. It's just a stream of text. I have an account there, but I haven't updated it in a year or so, not really much point putting pictures there unless you just want some weird comments from 15-year olds.

I've never had any old, old friends in IRC Galleria, but I was amazed that about the time when I did my Facebook account, most of my old friends from basic school etc showed up. Now we have pretty much a whole class down there and none of those guys is actually very internet-savvy. I don't use much of the apps of Facebook, but the way the profile is laid down, how easy it is to follow what people are up to and how the groups work, are updated and notifications are sent is just golden.

If IRC-Galleria somehow manages to broaden it's demographic, I'm really amazed. But even now I think it's almost like a slang word for a place where teenagers can hang out. First it was a bit of a joke, but nowadays you hear about if in every bus etc. If it's a teenager, they're talking about their IRC-Galleria chats or pictures.

Hi, good post. A few thoughts:

It's worth noting that the Swedish communities LunarStorm and Playahead which have very similar demographics and had about 1 mm and 500k users respectively just over a year ago, have also felt the full force of the "Facebook effect" that hit Sweden last summer and fall, reportedly losing about half their user bases!

While all the above points of analysis on why this is are great, I'd like to add one more that I think is often overlooked and makes a crucial difference, one which is also very hard to overcome for these older communities.

Unlike all the "old school" communities (like LunarStorm, Playahead, IRCGalleria and MySpace), Facebook was one of the first communities to build on REAL identities instead of made up identities/avatars/personas. This culture was intitially fostered and enforced technically by students having to register with their .edu adress (of which you only get one, and which can be checked/verified by your friends). As they grew, this enforcement was removed, but the culture stayed. On Facebook, you are you. Seem obvious today, but I remember clearly it felt pretty alien and strange to put your real name in there a few years ago "Anyone can find me now!?".

Well that's just the point. It turns out real identities make a an SNS vastly more useful for most (but not all) use cases:

1. Social accountability to a real world identity fosters a totally different dialouge that caters to a much wider and older demographic

2. "You" will always be you, and you can grow with your profile, while a faked identity/profile is something you are bound to leave. IMO this is much of Facebooks value and it's potential for longevity and success as the "Internet passport" solution it is aiming at. Something eg MySpace could never do (but LinkedIn could).

3. Real identities, mapped to real emails/phone numbers etc, makes it infinitely much easier to find friends, colleagues and acquantainces, which by definition increases the aggregate network value of the SNS.

IMO, the move from me (and most others) using a faked identity, to me using my real identity while interacting and transacting on the Internet, is by far the most important development of recent web history (much more important than the often technical definition of what Web 2.0 is/was).

So in conclusion, I think that IRCGalleria will unfortunately likely start to loose more ground, like it's swedish counterpars have. They still support a non-facebook use case of more anonymous communication with, and discovery of, non-real-life friends, which that Facebook does not. There is a market for this use case in the teen segment and like previous commenters said, they should focus and go after that. But I'm afraid this use case may only cover 10-30% of IRC Galleria's previous user base's usage, For the remaining 70-90% use cases of communicating with real-life friends, it is a much poorer tool than Facebook. I also intuitively (although there is no proof of this yet), think that it is much more valuable to own a graph of real-life friends, than a graph of virtual friends.

/Gustav

Thanks for posting the link. Useful data. Keep it up!

For the record, I wasn't criticising the demographics. I think that age group is fine. However, to grow, there must now be a serious, concentrated effort on international presence.

Another thing we talked about today: why not use the Habbo link? That has strong international presence and is under the same umbrella, with overlapping demographics, yet there is no apparent link between the two places.

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