Instant Messaging is one of the most convenient ways you can communicate over the internet with your chums. It’s often more practical than phone calls, especially those international ones, and faster than email. It enables you to have real-time, private online conversations.

You maintain a list of friends you want to contact and when you are both online a private window opens where you and your friend can type in messages that you can both see, it’s the nearest thing to a direct conversation using a computer. The emergence of smilies, and emoticons has increased the emotional impact of messages by replicating the expressions that are present in face-to-face conversation.

As well as online messages, you can also exchange images, sounds and files.

The three main messaging clients: MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and ICQ. However these only enable users with the same program to communicate with each other. MSN Messenger users, for example, cannot chat with ICQ users when they are online. It’s a perennial problem.

The Axmate chat application from Axmo integrates all communications traffic from MSN, Yahoo! and ICQ users into a single package. All your contacts from MSN, Yahoo! and ICQ can be stored in Axmate, and when online, you can chat with them all, without restriction. Your Instant Messaging world is immediately much bigger and all your friends don’t have to use the same service.

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