Instant Messenger

There is a story hiding behind the Instant messenger.

These existing Instant messengers help to chat online and also helps to send and download the files / images, to do voice chat, and so on.

Once upon a time, four young men in Israel created an instant messenger (IM) program called ICQ. It was free software, but users could contribute to the developers. There was some revenue from that -- the product did have 16 million users -- but Mirabilis, the company that made ICQ, was hardly becoming the next Microsoft. However, when AOL bought Mirabilis for $407 million in 1998, the developers were suddenly business geniuses.

That was a transaction of a different era. Nobody's going to become a zillionaire today making an ICQ work-alike. Still, a current product, Cerulean Studios' Trillion, is rapidly winning a large and loyal user base, and, like the early ICQ, it's also supported by donations.

Trillion isn't an IM system by itself. It's a desktop application that works with the existing IM networks AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), ICQ, Microsoft Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger. So if you have contacts on various networks, you no longer need to run the proprietary software for each one. If you've followed instant messaging, you know that this is a feat; AOL and Microsoft traditionally block third-party clients from using their systems. But Trillion stays ahead of these maneuvers, primarily because the company is solely focused on providing this function, according to 21-year-old CEO Scott Werndorfer. Scott tells that other companies that have offered interoperability really used that function to push their own networks.

This is a similar concept, for connecting either through a wire line or wireless connection. In fact, instant messaging came to the Internet before instant wireless, unless you consider Blackberry's always-on wireless-email. Therefore, you can use instant messaging on your Internet connection - like a chat room without using the wireless network. However, real instant messaging involves connection wherever you are - that implies wireless network connectivity. Instant messaging provides the following functions:

• Buddy List Presence and Location Management
• Workgroup Functions - transferring files, managing e-mail accounts

Instant messaging use in US businesses more than doubled from 2.3 billion minutes in September 2000 to 4.9 billion minutes last September.

Messengers | Futuristic e-messenger | Students' View