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IM allows effective and efficient communication, allowing immediate receipt of acknowledgment or reply.
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Some systems permit messages to be sent to users not then 'logged on' ( offline messages), thus removing some differences between IM and email (often done by sending the message to the associated email account). Of importance is that online chat and instant messaging differ from other technologies such as email due to the perceived quasi- synchrony of the communications by the users. Instant messaging is a set of communication technologies used for text-based communication between two ( private messaging) or more (chat room) participants over the Internet or other types of networks (see also LAN messenger). ( September 2014) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. This section needs additional citations for verification. Instant messaging remains very popular today IM apps are the most widely used smartphone apps: in 2018 there were over 1.3 billion monthly users of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and 980 million monthly active users of WeChat. BBM was for instance the most used mobile messaging app in the United Kingdom and Indonesia. Beginning with its first introduction in 2005, BlackBerry Messenger, which initially had been available only on BlackBerry smartphones, soon became one of the most popular mobile instant messaging apps worldwide. Later in the 1990s, ICQ was among the first closed and commercialized instant messengers, and several rival services appeared afterwards as it became a popular use of the Internet. Instant messaging was pioneered in the early Internet era the IRC protocol was the earliest to achieve wide adoption. It is usually distinguished from text messaging which is typically simpler and normally uses cellular phone networks. Depending on the IM protocol, the technical architecture can be peer-to-peer (direct point-to-point transmission) or client–server (an IM service center retransmits messages from the sender to the communication device). IM can also consist of conversations in " chat rooms".
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a wider social media platform, or a website where it can for instance be used for conversational commerce. Instant messaging systems tend to facilitate connections between specified known users (often using a contact list also known as a "buddy list" or "friend list"), and can be standalone applications or integrated into e.g. Most modern IM applications (sometimes called "social messengers", "messaging apps" or "chat apps") use push technology and also add other features such as emojis (or graphical smileys), file transfer, chatbots, voice over IP, or video chat capabilities. It differs from email in that conversations over instant messaging happen in real-time (hence "instant"). Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and triggers a transmission to the recipient(s), who are all connected on a common network.
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Instant messaging ( IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network.
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A classic example of instant messaging on a desktop computer: the left window of this software showing a list of contacts (" buddy list") and the right window an active IM conversation
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