Definition
Instant messaging falls under the umbrella term online chat, since it is also text-based, bi-directionally exchanged, and happens in real-time. IM is distinct from chat in that IM is based on clients that facilitate connections between specified known users (often using a contact list, buddy list, or friend list). Online 'chat' includes web-based applications that allow communication between (often directly addressed, but anonymous) users in a multi-user environment.
Read more about this topic: Instant Messaging
Famous quotes containing the word definition:
“The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Was man made stupid to see his own stupidity?
Is God by definition indifferent, beyond us all?
Is the eternal truth man’s fighting soul
Wherein the Beast ravens in its own avidity?”
—Richard Eberhart (b. 1904)
“The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction.... The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)