I've played in several campaigns run over IRC or Jabber, and I'm currently running a campaign over IRC. We generally don't use any special software, though for the campaing I'm currently running I've written a simple dice-rolling bot.
It generally works OK for us. It has pros and cons. Play tends to be slower, but if you set your client to log conversations, you have a log of everything that has been said. I use pidgin, and have it log to HTML. At the end of the session I can upload the logs to a website so the players have easy access to them.
I believe Inkscape now has a feature where multiple people can work on a single drawing over the internet. I've thought about using that as a map or diagram for online RPGs, but not got around to investigating it properly.
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