Instant Messaging

You can talk with people via e-mail (inside of Newsgroups or Mailing lists) or you can talk on-line with your friends who are connected to the net by using an IRC client. But inside of IRC channels, there are a lot of people chatting. So you could choose a particular client to chat exclusively with one friend of yours. There are several programs to do that. You have to register you in order to use these services. One of the most known is Powwow. By means of Powwow you can chat inside of virtual 'rooms' where people discuss about a specific subject. But you can also chat exclusively with one person if you know your alias. By means of powwow people can surf one the web together, can exchange files and so on. Another popular program is ICQ. This software is like Powwow, but it notifies you when your friend is on-line. ICQ (I seek you) 'sleeps' while you aren't on-line. But all times you connect on the Internet, it wake-up, and you can know if your friend is on-line. Another program pretty known is Excite Pal. It is almost like ICQ, but, instead of it, Excite Pal supports proxies. So you can use it even you are behind a firewall. Then there are AOL Instant Messenger and Advice ichat Pager. To use all these products, you have to download their programs. However if you don't want to download these programs, you can use Firefly Passport. It uses Java. Java is an independent platform programming language. So you can use it if you are a Win95 user, or a Mac user, or whether your operating system is UNIX or DOS or everything else. But unfortunately Java is still pretty slow. However, Firefly is a nice place, because there you can know people with your same interests. Firefly asks you for your favourite musical band for example, and it suggests you what people using Firefly have your same interests. Just another thing: in order to use these services, you have to enable cookies on your favourite web browser. They use cookies to recognize you when you login to their servers. They use cookies to know your interests and so on. Yeah, if you enable cookies all people can know your interests and where you usually go when you are connected on the Internet...Well, I suggest you to enable cookies only when you visit your favourite sites (where you are registered) and disable them when you are surfing here and there. Warning: when you disable cookies, some web browser delete them from your hard disk! So, the next time you visit Firefly for example, it can't recognize you. Therefore, I suggest you to save your cookies with another name ('firefly.txt' for example) or inside another directory. When you want to enable them, you have to rename them again to let your browser recognize them. Cookies are '.txt' files and they are usually stored inside web browser's directory, but Internet Explorer save them inside of 'windows\cookies\' folder.

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