Chatting with Your Friends via Empathy

Email is an extremely useful tool, but there's often quite a delay between sending a message and getting a response. What if you just fancy a quick chat? That's where instant messaging (IM) comes in. If you're not familiar with the concept, all you do is find your friend on an IM network and type a short message to them. Your message will show up on their screen in the blink of an eye. They can then reply to it, and you receive their reply just as quickly. So it continues, until you say goodbye and disconnect from the network.

There are lots of different IM networks out there, such as AIM, MSN/Windows Live, and Yahoo! Messenger. You can usually talk only to those people who are using the same network as you, ...

Get Ubuntu for Non-Geeks, 4th Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.