Have you used Instant Messaging or Internet Relay Chat too handle your customer fast and directly? I’m believe that you knew the email. Email in either conventional or web based forms is a good way to exchange information where a considered response is needed and when the recipient might not be sitting at their computer all day long. Email does lack the spontaneity and instant feedback of direct communication such as we get with a telephone conversation. There is a range of Internet applications that fills the gap between email and direct conversation. Most of these are based on an old UNIX program called ‘talk’ that allowed users sharing the same computer to type messages to each other and see the responses directly on their screens. In essence this is a conversation carried on through a keyboard and screen. Just like some telephone services, this idea can be extended to a ‘conference call’ where many people talk to each other.
As you might expect, this idea has been adopted widely using the Internet as the medium of communication. Unfortunately it has grown in a rather unstandardised manner, with many suppliers providing proprietary systems that do not work well together. One approach is the ‘Instant Message’ idea. There are several of these services all of which are very popular.
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is rather like the newsgroup idea we discussed earlier, except that all the participants can send messages (chat) to each other live on-line. There is some degree of standardisation in this area and this has allowed specialised IRC client software to be developed that makes using this type of service less confusing. Instead of newsgroups, IRC uses chat rooms within each of which a different subject is being discussed. Users can leave and join chat rooms at any time, and may be able to create new chat rooms to discuss a different topic.
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