IRC is old, and somewhat unfriendly if you have no patience to set it up correctly. But it is by far the best system to use, you can set it to start when you turn your PC on and log you into all the channels you want automatically. By far the best way for organising stuff.
Don’t know about you XBOX users but if my XBOX is on and I’m playing something my PC is also going to be on and I run it all through the same monitor so one touch of a button means I can flick from playing some Fallout3 to checking a game walkthrough on the net 😀