Since the Internet’s growth in the 1990′s near-instant communication had such dramatic effects on world culture. Of course, the Internet is all about communication, and all the websites that appeared when the World Wide Web came out were just some of the ways that information was disseminated. There are several ways for people to interact with each other online now, whether through text-based means, or audio, image, or video.
E-mail is an important communications service available on the Internet. E-mail is an important communications service available on the Internet. Letters have been used since ancient times, and sending messages electronically started out with the advent of the telegraph. Of course, means of sending messages to the computer was soon developed, and e-mailing helped changed the way people communicated.
Online chat is instantaneous, but it works in real time, so it requires people to be online for them to exchange text-based messages. Internet Relay Chat is one of the earliest forms of online chat, and remains very popular worldwide. People can log in to a chat room and chat with whoever else is logged in, opening virtual rooms of their own for private conversations. The oldest chat rooms available are still text-based, but some also use voice and text.
Instant messaging also offers real-time communication and allows easy collaboration. E-mail services like Yahoo included instant messaging as part of the service, making it different from IRC by giving people the option to subscribe to a channel, and messages are received by the user as soon as they are made.
With the Internet forum, or message board, people can post messages for a group to discuss. In a forum, discussions are grouped into subforums that cover several specific topics, or threads. Messages are archived, unlike in chat where discussions disappear when the users log out. Messages may need to be approved by the forum moderator.
Many web logs, or blogs, regularly provide information on a particular subject. There are many types of blogs. Many are like personal diaries, or journals. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. What makes the blog different from the websites that came out in the 90s is that people can leave their comments about the topic, which the person maintaining the blog can reply to. People usually subscribe to a blog to receive the latest updates, and perhaps a reply from the blogger. Twitter is a microblog, and every tweet sent by the account holder is available for the entire world to read, or at least to a select few who are following.
Once it became possible for the voice to be transmitted in chat rooms, it was not long before VOIP would revolutionize the telephone service. VoIP stands for Voice-over-Internet Protocol, but better understood as an Internet Telephone. Using the Internet as the carry a person’s voice makes it cheaper to make calls, especially long distance calls. VoIP users won’t be able to communicate during power shortages, though.
Social networking services have gotten very popular in the past few years. Such services combined e-mail, microblogging, instant messaging, all for the purpose of bringing people together. It allows people to connect to others with the same interests, beliefs, knowledge, relations.
There are many more forms of communication being used on the Web, and still more will be made in the future. Already some of the forms above are being used less and less often, and may soon be obsolete. Only time will reveal what the future holds.