Chatting, as you learned in the last chapter, is nice, but it’s also very public, and very unstructured. What if you just want to “talk” to another online user, in a more private fashion, one-on-one?
Fortunately, there is another method of online communication that is faster than e-mail and more private than chat rooms. Instant messaging lets you send short electronic messages back and forth to other online users, in real time, without the need to enter a public chat room.