From PC Magazine
During its first few years of life, instant messaging was a trivial technology used in trivial ways. Offering little more than e-mail without the lag time, services like ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) were popular mostly with computer-savvy high schoolers and college students—a new way to exchange late-night gossip.
All that has changed: Today, IM delivers far more than just text chatting. Consumer IM software now lets you swap files, share applications, and interact via streaming audio and video. You can use it to send text messages to cell phones and pagers, as well as to make voice calls to telephones. You can even play games and trade digital greeting cards. E-mail minus the lag time was only the beginning.
The real news is how enormously popular IM has become. In 1998, according to research firm IDC, more than 63 million people held IM accounts. By the end of last year, that figure nearly tripled to 174 million. Somewhere along the line, instant messaging went mainstream. All sorts of people, not just Internet-mad teenagers, saw IM as a welcome alternative to more conventional means of communication.
Like a telephone call, an instant message gives you real-time interaction. Yet like e-mail, it feels less personal and more detached than a phone call. You can easily engage strangers—and just as easily cut them off. But this is only part of IM’s appeal. Unlike any other communication tool, IM tells you whether someone is waiting to be contacted before you try to contact them by indicating whether they’re on- or off-line.
As to which IM software is best, PC Magazine says, “It was a close call between Yahoo! Messenger and Microsoft’s IM product, but MSN Messenger delivers the slickest interface and the best integration.”