Understanding Instant Messaging

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.