Instant Messaging
Instant messaging provides real-time communication between two or more people and often provides presence information as well. Some examples of instant messaging applications are ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Microsoft Messenger and Jabber/XMPP.
Recently there has been a great effort towards integrating multimedia such as audio and video into instant messaging. Applications that offer audio are known as VoIP (Voice over IP). Examples include Gizmo, Asterisk, WengoPhone, Skype and Google Talk.
Real-time communication and rich awareness are propitious for informal collaboration and often are part of groupware applications. Some examples of groupwares are Lotus Sametime, Adobe Acrobat Connect and Groove.
There have been several attempts to create a unified standard for instant messaging. The most popular standards are SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and Jabber/XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol).
