Instant Messaging – Today

Today’s messaging has loads and loads of features, we wouldn’t even dream about for even twenty years ago. The most used IM’s today like AIM, ICQ or MSN(of course there are many more) do have hundreds of advanced features like Live Webcam Broadcasting, RSS-feeds or even Voice-to-Voice communication. The messengers today almost all look the same, the big difference, that makes the users choose their favorite IM, is almost always the community that comes with each messenger.

The following list is the list of IM’s, and it’s user count:

• AIM 53 Million
• Ebuddy 35 Million
• MSN/WLM 27 Million
• Yahoo! M 22 Million
• QQ 20 Million
• Sametime 15 Million
• Skype 8 Million
• Xfire 6.1 Million
• ICQ 4 Million

These IM’s all have an immense amount if users connected to it’s servers, so its important to choose the right one, in order to get in contact with the people you are interested in.

Internet Relay Chat - IRC

IRC is one of the first chat “client to server” protocol based applications, yet is one of the most advanced clients you can get. For all you that haven’t heard anything about IRC, but still know some about computers, you should definitely try it, it’s not really a instant messenger as the most of you know it, it’s more like a mass chat communication program where you can sit in a constant chat conversation with thousands of people from all over the world.

I personally use this messenger client all the time, because it covers all my interest areas, but for some who prefer only to talk to people they know and trust, a instant messenger as you know them today is more the thing for them.For the technical part of IRC, then IRC is a lot more advanced and a paradise for skilled computer users.

A big part of the IRC concept is that you are able to connect to servers with different “bots” and that you are able customize the clients alot with your own scripts etc., these can help you to administrate a channel and do different jobs for you, for example kick “spamming” users etc..

IRC is a OpenSource project and can be found anywhere on the net. The whole idea behind IRC is to connect chat communities together; witch is a really nice concept if you ask me. The way you chat with IRC, is that you connect to a IRC-Network where you can choose a large number of channels to hold your conversations in. The largest networks today, are hosting about 150.000 users all the time and have over 20 servers connected to their network.

Kind regards,
Nimai Hemmersbach & André Valentin

Instant Messaging - The Past

We are currently researching, HOW and WHEN the Instant Messaging came to birth / started. What we have been reading, is that Instant Messaging (IM) slowly started up in the 1970's on the local networks around the U.S (mainly). Back then the messaging was all just performed in the console, compareable to the "net send" feature we have in the "Windows" operating system today. The way was not long, from local network to the internet. At the beginning of the 1990's programs such as IRC where discovered around the internet, and that was where the IM really started.

In the late 1990's the modern GUI-based messaging programs came to birth, such as ICQ or AIM - those are also applications we know today and use today.

Next we will publish something about the Internet Relay Chat - IRC.

Kind regards,
Nimai Hemmersbach & André Valentin

New Blog!

Welcome to our new Weblog about Instant Messaging.

The blog serves a school project at the Grenå Teknisk Skole(www.gts.dk), and it will be updated frequently - any posts are welcome(theme related).

Kind regards,
André Valentin & Nimai Hemmersbach