Very similar in nature to AOL, ICQ allows millions of people to chat anywhere in the world. Currently boasting 20 million members, ICQ is the latest and greatest in Internet Chat. The software is free, though it's rumored that this could change soon. There is a link directly on the left that will take you to the download sites. IRC stands for the Internet Relay Chat.
All conversations take place in real time.
That's one of the strengths of IRC, and IRC has been used extensively for live coverage of world events, news, sports commentary, etc. It also serves as an extremely inexpensive substitute for long distance communications. Most of the popular search engines provide a chat forum. Your Internet Browser must be able to support Java in order to use these chat rooms. If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or above or Netscape Navigator 4.0 or above, you are already supported for Java by default.