Oliver's ability to take a concept and frame it in a way that is not only humorous and therefore captivating, but also easy to understand, is awesome. The guy's a genius.
It's a shame there wasn't widespread support for XMPP's XEP-0045 (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html). It was the closest thing to IRC that I believe could've made it the new communication powerhouse in its place with its adoption by Google and Facebook, among others. IRC is great but there's no denying it's dying. It's shed to 60% of its userbase since 2003. It's not gaining new users.
Matrix (http://matrix.org/) looks pretty good, but I feel that it's trying to fill a niche that isn't there. A simple, open (in terms of channels / rooms), chat protocol that doesn't have a complex barrier to entry would work wonders.