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My telephone doesn't ring as often as it did 10 years ago. Had it happened 10 years earlier, it would seriously have made me think. Don't people want to talk with me any longer? Did I offend them? ALL of them?

But it didn't happen 10 years ago, this is the present. And the phone ringing less is a sign of the times, not of my diminishing popularity among my friends. Like emails have long ago started to replace letters and postcards, the telephone also is losing some of its significance as a communications tool. But what is it being replaced by?

Among other new means of communication a lot of people today communicate by instant messaging, chat and through forums on websites. They keep in touch with their friends over the Internet, many even find new friends that way. But how does it work and what is the difference between those three?

INSTANT MESSAGING (IM):

The Internet offers a lot of free communication tools for instant messaging. Yahoo, MSN, and AOL, to name just a few, allow their users with their messaging services to exchange text messages free of charge. All messengers allow their users to create a list of contacts. The list shows you which of your contacts are online and available (and willing) to IM at any given time. By simply clicking on the name of one of your contacts a new window pops up on your screen. You can type in a message to your contact, send it off and the message instantly arrives on your friend's computer.

Depending on the messenger used and on the individual preferences of a user, either the message pops up on the screen the moment it arrives, or an acoustic or visual signal announces the arrival of a new message. Replying to a message is even easier, all you have to do is type into the empty field below the message you received. Most messengers log the active sessions, so you can always scroll back up in the conversation if you lost track at some point. This is especially helpful if you try to hold more than one conversation at a time.
Instant messaging can be done just one on one, with nobody 'listening' in, ensuring the privacy of the users. If you want to, you can invite several of your contacts into one conversation. It can also be done from a mobile phone as an alternative to sometime costly text messaging.

Most instant messengers offer additional option to 'text-talk'. They also allow you to establish a voice connection between two or more computers, the quality of the transmission is usually as good as a phone line, sometimes

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