AOL Chat. Review on Aol Messenger

I should point out that I always have preferred ICQ as an Instant Messenging program but the other day I decided to download and try AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) and see what it's like since many people are saying the new ICQ is very much like AIM and I do like the new version of ICQ (although not the ads).

<B>In General</B>

In general, the look of AIM is very pleasing and very simple to use. It's a very small interface which means that you can have it on your screen and it won't block much of what your looking at. If you have a long buddy list it might get in your way a little but you can minimize it which is what I would recommend anyway.

There are 4 tabs for categories that you can add your buddies to (these are preset but you can change them), they are:

<I>Buddies

Family

Co-Workers

Offline</I>

These make it very simple to find when your friends are on and be able to talk to them.

<B>Features</B>

There are many features that are built in AIM also. Such as:

<I>Chat</I> - You can send messages instantly all over the world to your friends.

<I>View when friends are on</I> - You will know when your friends are online or offline and if they are at their computer - there are many different away messages that you can use.

<I>Chat</I> - You can also go into Chat Rooms with your friends from Messenger or invite them to join you within a chat that your already.

<I>Alerts</I> - You can set alerts to let you know when friends come online or leave.

<B>Easy to Use</B>

Just like AOL is very simple for people new to the internet to use so is AIM. This is probably the easiest of all Instant Messenger programs to use (although I still do prefer ICQ over AIM). They have a lot of help files that will guide every aspect of the use of this program. I have not seen any questions that are not answered there so a new user will not be lost using this program.

<B>Get News</B>

You can also get news, weather and stock market quotes from AIM, which is very nice that they included this feature within a messenger program.

<B>Junk Messages</B>

Yes, you probably know that just like AOL e-mail you will get a lot of junk messages. I guess this should be expected with a service as large as AOL and AIM because they are easy targets. So if you have an easy name for people to guess you will probably end up with more junk messages than other people. So to avoid this I would recommend a very hard name for people to guess but a name easy for your friends to remember.

<B>Conclusion</B>

If you have a lot of friends that use AIM than this is a good program to get and use. You can talk to friends that you have that have AOL also if you use a different ISP. That means that you don't have to use AOL to talk to friends that do use AOL.