Email is just one way to communicate online. For many
users, instant messaging is a better way to talk; it’s more immediate,
because you can send text messages in real time to your friends and
coworkers. No more waiting for people to respond to your emails—when
both parties are online at the same time, it’s just like having a
one-on-one conversation!
Technology-wise,
email works a little differently from most Internet applications. Email (both web based and POP), Usenet, and the World Wide
Web operate via a traditional client/server model, with most of the
heavy lifting done via a network of dedicated servers. For example, your
POP email is stored on and managed by an email server, while all the
pages on the web are hosted on millions of individual web servers.
Instant messaging, however,
doesn’t use servers at all. When you send an instant message to another
user, that message goes directly to that user’s PC; it’s not filtered by
or stored on any servers. The technical name for this type of
connection is peer-to-peer (P2P), because the two computers involved are peers to each other.
All instant messaging needs
to work is a piece of client software (one for each computer involved,
of course) and the IP addresses of each computer. The messages go
directly from one IP address to another, with no servers in the middle
to slow things down. (Naturally, the data must still make its way
through numerous routers to get to the other PC, but that’s part and
parcel of any Internet-based application.)
There are several big
players in the instant messaging market today, including America Online
(with both AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ), Google (Google Talk),
Microsoft (Windows Live Messenger), and Yahoo! (Yahoo! Messenger).
Unfortunately, most of these products don’t work well (or at all) with
each other. If you’re using Yahoo! Messenger, for example, you can’t
communicate with someone running AOL Instant Messenger. That means
you’ll want to use the IM program that all your friends and coworkers
are using—so find that out before you download any software.
AOL Instant Messenger
The most-used instant messaging program is AOL Instant Messenger (www.aim.com),
also known as AIM. AOL claims more than 60 million users, which makes
it the number-two IM service today, second only to Yahoo! Messenger. For
whatever reason, AIM is especially popular among the teen and preteen
crowd, although people of all ages can and do use it.
AIM, shown in Figure 1,
supports all manner of special features in addition to basic text
messaging. You get file sharing, RSS feeds, group chats, ability to text
message to and from mobile phones, voice chat, video chat, and even a
mobile client. You can also enhance the basic AIM experience with a
variety of official and user-created plug-ins.
Google Talk
Google
Talk is the name of both Google’s instant messaging network and its IM
client. You can download the Google Talk client and learn more about the
Google Talk network at talk.google.com.
You can access Google
Talk from a web-based Google Talk gadget, a standalone Google Talk
client program (similar to what’s offered by both AIM and Yahoo!
Messenger), or from your Gmail and iGoogle web pages. As with competing
IM systems, Google Talk lets you send and receive both text-based
instant messages and Voice over IP (VoIP) Internet phone calls.
Most people will use Google Talk via the web-based Google Talk “gadget.” You launch the Google Talk gadget by going to talk.google.com
and clicking the Launch Google Talk button. With the gadget, there’s no
software to download; Google Talk opens in its own small browser
window, as shown in Figure 2.
If you want increased functionality, such as file transfer, you can download the Google Talk client,
which is a separate software program. The main Google Talk client
window looks a lot like the Google Talk gadget window; however, if the
person you’re chatting with also has the Google Talk client installed,
you can send files back and forth between yourselves, using the Send
Files button.
Unfortunately, Google
Talk isn’t as widely used as competing IM services. I’m not sure why
that is, but you’ll definitely want to make sure your friends or
coworkers are using Google Talk before you settle on this service for
your IM needs.
Note
Google Talk has
recently been connected to the AOL Instant Messenger network—so you can
now use Google Talk to message with all your AIM buddies, and vice
versa.
ICQ
The granddaddy of all instant messaging programs is ICQ (www.icq.com).
ICQ was birthed by a company named Mirabilis back in 1996, but was
acquired by America Online in 1998. Today, AOL maintains ICQ and AIM as
separate programs—so separate that ICQ users can’t talk to AIM users, or
vice versa.
Like most other IM
programs, ICQ is totally free. You also get grouped conversations, voice
messaging, photo viewing, and other state-of-the-art features.
Note
ICQ stands for “I seek you”—say it out loud.
Windows Live Messenger
Not
surprisingly, Microsoft is a major participant in the instant messaging
market. The program currently known as Windows Live Messenger does all
the main things AIM and Yahoo! Messenger do, including voice chat and
the ability to page a contact’s mobile phone. With more than 27 million
users, Windows Live Messenger is a solid middle-of-the-pack player.
Note
Windows Live Messenger was formally known as both MSN Messenger and Windows Messenger.
Yahoo! Messenger
With more than 90 million users, the most popular instant messenger program today is Yahoo! Messenger, shown in Figure 3.
In addition to traditional text messaging, Yahoo! Messenger features
voice and video messaging, PC-to-phone and PC-to-PC calling, voicemail,
file sharing, and chat rooms. It also lets you receive up-to-the-minute
stock prices, news headlines, sports scores, weather forecasts, and
notification of any waiting Yahoo! Mail—all courtesy of the Yahoo!
family of services.
Note
Many of the companies
that offer web-based productivity applications also offer some form of
proprietary instant messaging or chat service; so do most of the
web-based desktops. These services, such as Zoho Chat (chat.zoho.com)
set up private IM networks between registered users; they don’t work
with the major instant messaging services. To that end, these
proprietary services are useful for team members collaborating on a
project—assuming they’re all using the company’s other cloud
services—but not for general IM purposes.
