Instant Messaging (IM) — More Than Just Chatting

Much like e-mail, Instant Messaging (IM) has revolutionised the way we communicate and work together. With just a few mouse clicks and keystrokes on your PC, you can instantly talk with anyone around the world through your Internet connection. While you are typing text to them in real time ("chatting"), you can also share files, photos, videos or other data with them on the side, you can even include a live video image of yourself as in a video conference, show them a PowerPoint presentation or even let them work jointly with you on a document. And the best thing is, all of this is virtually free, apart from your normal Internet access charges.

What's It Good For?

It's a great way of communicating, especially if you are PC-bound and already online for most of your day and/or night, at work or in your private time. Just watch out because chatting online can be a big distraction. On the other hand IM is particularly convenient and time-efficient because you can do it on the side. It takes 5 seconds to type off a line to your friend quickly in between two other things you are doing, and if he or she happens to be busy right at that moment, the message will just sit there on the other screen until he or she has a spare moment just like yours to answer it — overall this is much more time efficient than getting on the phone and having a full-time conversation.

And it's not just something for private stuff among friends - more and more people use IM for their business communication as well: It's time-efficient, it delivers something in writing instead of just verbally said, it's cheaper than calling on the phone, especially long distance or overseas, and, besides the written communication it has all those other services integrated as described earlier, including voice conversations.
For the latter, Voice over Internet (VoIP) technology and the available worldwide Internet bandwidth have improved sufficiently in the past few years so that you can have decent quality voice conversations these days, around the world, for virtually free.

Is It Dangerous?

Well, yes — viruses and hackers have found their way in through Instant Messengers too, but if you are afraid of that you might as well also stop using e-mail and browsing the Web. The better virus scanners these days cover Instant Messaging. Also, you should have a firewall, especially if you are online a lot of the time.

The other thing is privacy. Do not enter information about yourself (such as phone numbers etc.) into your profile that most IMs offer if you do not want that information to be known publicly. Should you still encounter troublesome users, all IMs let you block certain users.

Spam?

Yes, some IMs are known to have, or at least to have experienced a bit of a spam problem, but your author here is using three of the most popular IM clients almost around the clock and has never seen a single spam on any of them in many years.

A Little History

Since the early 1990s, America Online (AOL) members have been able to "chat" with each other online, ie. type text to each other in real time, but it wasn't until 1996, when AOL introduced a feature called the Buddy List (more on this later), that this first form of Instant Messaging became really popular. In the same year, an Israel-based company called Mirabilis entered the scene with a product called ICQ ("I Seek You") which helped to popularise Instant Messaging further. While AOL Instant Messaging was exclusive to AOL members, ICQ was a free IM software available for everyone to download.

In 1997, AOL copied this idea and introduced AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), an IM client freely available for download, enabling anyone, whether AOL member or not, to chat with each other. In 1998, AOL actually bought Mirabilis, thus becoming the dominant player in Instant Messaging.

As the popularity of Instant Messaging grew, other IM clients like Microsoft's MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and a variety of smaller players entered the mix. User statistics vary greatly and are not always clear in what they refer to — downloads, registered user names, active users — but it seems likely that AOL is the leading player with probably well over 100 million registered user names and around 50 million active users. MSN is probably a close second with similar figures, and Yahoo third, about 30% behind its competitors. ICQ claimed more than 100 million users in the late 1990s, but numbers have dropped sharply with users migrating to AIM and because spammers had found their way into ICQ.

A Lack Of Interoperability

Until today, there is no standard protocol for Instant Messaging, which means that users of one IM product can communicate only among themselves, not with users of the other products. In 1999, Microsoft tried to create a bridge between users of its MSN Messenger and the more numerous AOL members and AIM users. AOL viewed this as a security risk (or just a competitive challenge?) and blocked MSN Messenger from its systems. Some products, like Trillian http://www.trillian.cc for example, tried to bridge the interoperability gap by integrating the various protocols into a single client.

In November 2003, AOL announced that AIM and ICQ are now interoperable — for text messages only. File transfer and other applications are to follow.

So Which Client?

All the major IM clients are free, so which one should you choose? They all have their pros and cons, so you may want to look out for certain features (described below) that are particularly important to you. The most popular Instant Messengers are AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger, and they have become more and more similar over the years, so the key question is really: "Which one are most of your friends or colleagues using?". You will probably find yourself using a number of different clients in parallel, maybe all of those mentioned above, in order to be able to communicate with all of your friends and colleagues and to be able to use all of the features occasionally that some clients provide and others don't.

Getting Started

All you need to do is download one of the IM clients that are freely available on the Internet. You'll find the above mentioned most popular ones at:

When you launch your IM client software, you will see a main window containing something called the Buddy List (AOL), Contact List (MSN and ICQ) or Friend List (Yahoo). all basically the same thing, a list of the people you want to communicate with. Two examples are shown in Figure 1, AIM and Yahoo. All IM clients provide a facility to easily set up your list, add and remove people and organise them into groups (eg. Friends, Colleagues). ICQ is good in the way that it requires an explicit authorisation from you before anyone can add you to their list. AOL and Yahoo allow you to edit contact info of your friends (names, phone numbers etc.) while MSN displays only the contact info that your friend has entered and made publicly available.

A nice feature of Yahoo is that you can have your friends' real names or nicknames (that you define) appear in your Friends List rather than just their (sometimes cryptic) user names or e-mail addresses. MSN, again, will only display a nickname that your friend has defined.

All three Messengers let you define whether you want them to launch and sign in automatically when you start up your computer and go online, or whether you want to do that manually at a time that suits you.

Once you have set up your friend list (let's use this Yahoo term in general now), your IM main window will show you which of your friends are currently online and you will receive audiovisual alerts when friends come online.
AIM and Yahoo can be configured to show only online friends in your friend list and hide the offline ones — a feature that is quite useful once your friend list is quite long.

AIM and Yahoo can be configured to show only online friends in your friend list and hide the offline ones — a feature that is quite useful once your friend list is quite long.

Figure 1