Here's a quick guide to other popular Internet services you can use right now, as well as some of the more exciting Internet technologies now in their infancy. This is NOT news in the usual sense - but it is useful. With close to 20,000 news groups, the range of topics is unbelievable. The messages stay on a central server. Second, the messages can be threaded by your news reader making it far easier to follow an exchange where several individuals are commenting on the same topic.
Chats come in various flavors.
Now there are chats built into the web and into advanced Internet technology, such as the Video conferencing tool, CU-SeeMe. IRC had similar uses during the coup against Boris Yeltsin in September 1993, where IRC users from Moscow were giving live reports about the unstable situation there. Your Web browser may be all you ever need for FTP, but if you eventually do something more sophisticated, such as maintain a Web site on a distance server, then you will need special FTP software to send and receive files, change file names, etc. Cross that bridge when and if you come to it.