Perhaps technology is too general a term. The “internet” would be a more specific term. When the Internet was in its infancy, we could only read text in the form of static web pages or email. But that was a long time ago. The Internet rapidly maturing. There are a plethora of applications that are freely available for download. These applications allow internet users to connect with one another for free.

The birth of instant messengers and chat applications.

Those who have been surfing the Internet for the past decade or so will be familiar with instant messengers and chat applications. In the early days, the popular chat application was IRC (Internet Relayed Chat). To chat with others, we had to connect to a chat server, and join a “chat room”. Once there, we could either chat with everyone else, or click on a nick and start a personal chat. Chatting in this context simply means typing messages that are relayed to the server, which it turn appear on the other party’s screen. The process is almost instantaneous. It was a lot of fun to chat and make friends in IRC chat rooms.

Shortly after that, someone came up with the idea of instant chat, but without having to login to chat rooms. We saw the first instant messenger taking the world by storm – ICQ. In just a few short years, ICQ gained millions of users all over the world.  Read more...