Instant Messaging

Once upon a time, there was the letter. For thousands of years, a simple process--ink to paper, paper to envelope, envelope to courier--satisfied what have come to be known as "consumer communication needs." But modern consumers are an impatient lot, and since impatience is the mother of invention, society has produced a steady flow of innovations--electronic mail, for example, which was thought to have closed the book on convenient correspondence once and for all. Log on, tap out your message, press Send. No muss, no fuss, no cost. What could be easier?

The answer, it turns out, is instant messaging (IM), a technology that's revolutionizing online communication. Instant messaging is exactly what the name suggests: e-mail without the wait. It allows two or more connected users to have conversations or swap documents in real time. In fact, the moment you come online, a list appears on your desktop, notifying you which of your friends and colleagues are also online. Click on the person's screen name, type a message, and voilà!--instant communication that makes e-mail look like the Pony Express.

The explosion seems pretty imminent. ICQ, a messaging system created by the Israeli company Mirabilis Ltd. and one of the early leaders in the field, has been growing at an eye-popping rate of 1 million new subscribers every 22 days (it now has some 13 million users). America Online has its own instant-messaging system, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), offered free of charge and available for downloading to AOL subscribers and nonsubscribers alike. AOL's instant-messaging network now boasts 30 million users and sees traffic of an estimated 225 million messages every day. Yahoo has gotten in the game by releasing its own pager that combines IM chat with several additional features, including e-mail and stock-price notification.