September Focus: Communication in Real Time
By John Anderson

E-mail is quick, easy, and convenient to use, but it still doesn’t provide a direct link between people. That important message you sent a moment ago could end up languishing for hours, even days, before someone replies. But if e-mail isn’t immediate enough for the hurried online masses, what is?

Welcome to real-time text, audio, and video. Real-time communications technology is growing more and more popular on the Internet; eventually it may even challenge e-mail’s reign as the choice for online interaction among friends and business partners.

With the right computer tools, you can carry on a conversation in text, or even in audio and video. Terms such as “chatting” and “instant messaging” are real-time text exchanges, but these activities take on new meaning when you add in audio and video.

Real-time communication is not a new facet of the Internet, as millions of IRC (Internet Relay Chat) users already know. IRC is one of the pioneering real-time chat systems, established in the late 1980s.

IRC is a text-based chat system in which all users must download and install to let you interact in the network. MIRC (www.mirc.com) is a friendly IRC client that is well equipped with many options and tools.

Once you’ve logged on to the Internet, you connect to an IRC server that lets you to join one of thousands of discussions, or channels, on different topics.

The wide-ranging diversity of channels offered by IRC is one of its greatest attractions, as is its fast pace. Its real-time text chatting occurs just as fast as people can type. In any given channel, there may be dozens of conversations occurring simultaneously, whizzing along at a speed difficult to follow. It can be a head-spinning situation for newcomers, but adjusting doesn’t take long.

Because text chatting is a substantial means of communication, many people are foregoing IRC’s “channel” system, where anyone at all can see important messages. Instead, chatters use an increasingly popular form of text communications called instant messaging, or IM. Software clients for IM include MSN Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. One Internet service that strives to bring them all together is PowWow (www.powWow.com), allowing you to view info from multiple IM account providers. IM has become so popular that the number of instant messages sent daily exceeds letters sent by the U.S. Postal Service.

ICQ (http://www.icq.com), (an abbreviated form of “I Seek You”) actually pioneered the IM concept. ICQ’s most revolutionary feature is its “online indicator” capabilities. Just include friends on your Contact List and ICQ prompts you when they log on to the Internet. It works because to use ICQ, users must register with a server that assigns them a UIN (Universal Internet Number). When someone with a UIN logs on to the Internet, ICQ alerts everyone who has listed that person on a Contact List.

Once ICQ has located one of your online buddies, you can chat, play games, and exchange files. ICQ also lets you execute voice chats, another form of real-time communication.

Voice chatting over the Internet is slowly but steadily maturing. The affordability of PC-to-PC and PC-to-phone calling has drawn millions to try Internet telephony, which used to be solely the pursuit of computer hobbyists. Continually improving bandwidth capabilities have increased the appeal of Internet telephony, because better audio and even video are now available.

In the past, people adventurous enough to try using Internet telephony systems were rewarded with a lot of crackling static. They also might hear an eerie echo, and if they were lucky, the tinny voice of the person they were calling. The complexity of telephony transmissions over the Internet creates major quality issues. Slight delays don’t have much of an effect on e-mail, but when you are dealing with a real-time audio (or video) stream of data, any delay causes problems.

Poor quality is still an issue, yet Internet telephony is getting more popular every day. To try out a computer-based phone call, just log on to one of numerous Web telephony sites. One of the most-used sites is Dialpad (www.dialpad.com). The service enables you to connect PC-to-PC and PC-to-phone calls, including international calls.  Long-distance calls within the US are free, and all Dialpad PC-to-PC calls, including international calls, are also free. International PC-to-phone connections are also relatively inexpensive. For example, a call to Germany from the U.S. costs about 15 cents per minute.

Cheap phone calls are great, but the ultimate form of real-time communication is high-quality audio chat integrated with video with several people at the same time. It’s the stuff of futuristic science fiction movies-or at least, it used to be.

A number of possibilities currently exist for one-to-one video chat connections, and depending on some hardware factors, you may enjoy excellent results. The faster connection you have, the better your results, so using ISDN (Integrated Service Digital Network), a DSL (Digital Subscriber Line), or a cable modem is recommended because these provide greater bandwidth for audio and full-motion video.

If you want to quickly initiate a video chat, try either CUSeeMe (http://www.cuseeme.com) or NetMeeting (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/netmeeting). CUSeeMe works right on the Web site without any special software, but NetMeeting requires that you download their program from Microsoft.

NetMeeting lets you visit another person’s desktop, use text-based chat, exchange files, and even jointly share programs. Register with CUSeeMe and you have immediate access to video chat rooms. Once you’ve joined a chat room, you can view video of the people with whom you’ve decided to chat.

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