Internet messaging services might seem like a juvenile endeavor. Oh those crazy kids with their AIM and their twitter. Don’t be so quick to dismiss these services though. Given the right situations these communication services can be incredibly useful.

My beautiful fiance and I are currently shopping for wedding / reception venues right now and thankfully the future mother-in-law is very excited to help. So we tried to slug through coordinated web searching&hellip over the phone. Arg. Let’s say that it was a little like pulling teeth.

IM services like AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Instant Messanger, Google Talk, and others are great for passing links back and forth. For example, I was just chatting (voice to voice) with my good friend Dan on Skype and we would throw links back and forth with the built in text messaging system. (Does anyone see any exceptional usefulness in internet customer service?)

If you use google mail, a chat service is already built in, just log-in, and any chats you receive will pop up. They also recently added video conferencing which is a nice addition if you like to look your chattee in the eyes.

I would say that at least for now at least an AIM account is pretty necessary. Fortunately, they are completely free and can be used in real-time anywhere in the world (I’m aiming with my friend in China right now). You can actually use AIM express which is completely web-based and doesn’t require any downloads if you’d prefer.