A Variety of Chats with iPhone

Your iPhone is not only a powerful phone but also a messaging heavyweight. It supports text and multimedia messaging out of the box, can do AIM-style instant messaging and Internet chats with third-party apps, and can even be used for voice and video chats. Social networking services have expanded exponentially over the past few years, and the iPhone has been at the forefront of this explosion.

Messaging allows you to communicate instantly with colleagues and friends. It brings people closer together without relying on the immediacy of a phone call. Instant messaging is asynchronous; you send a message, and the recipient can respond to it (or not) at their leisure. That’s unlike a phone conversation, which is synchronous, where you and the recipient have an immediate back-and-forth interchange of ideas.

Several big players dominate the messaging world: e-mail, SMS, MMS, IM, IRC, Facebook, and Twitter. If these names already sound familiar to you, feel free to skip ahead. If not, don’t let the acronyms dampen your enthusiasm. You are probably already familiar with these technologies. Here’s a quick rundown:

• SMS: SMS stands for Short Message Service. It’s the feature that most people call text messaging. With it, you can send short messages from one phone to another. It lets you carry on typed conversations without placing a voice-based call. The iPhone fully supports SMS messaging, and it’s the most common way to conduct iPhone chats. SMS operates on the same network as your voice phone calls, so it often works when your data connection is down. SMS messages can arrive any time your phone is turned on, and they don’t require a special app to be running on your iPhone.

• MMS: MMS is the multimedia version of SMS; it stands for Multimedia Messaging Service. MMS messages can include audio, video, and images, and text can be formatted to include multiple fonts as well as italics and bold. If a picture can tell a thousand words, sending an MMS message with a photo might keep you from doing a lot of unnecessary text messaging. As with SMS, MMS works over the voice network, not the data network.

• IM: IM means instant messaging. It’s a way to communicate in real time by typing text. If you use AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, or iChat, you’re using IM. There are many instant messaging apps for the iPhone, so you’ll be able to keep in touch with your friends and co-workers easily.

• IM is different from text and multimedia messaging in five key ways. First, it requires a connection to a data network. Second, the service itself is free—you pay only for the data plan on your iPhone. Next, it can allow typed conversations with more than one person at a time. Fourth, you need to sign into an IM server. The server acts as the gateway for messages to pass between you and others. Finally, it requires that your IM app be up and running for the duration of the chat. If you’ve quit the app, you’re not going to receive messages.

• IRC: Internet Relay Chat is a relatively ancient (1988) messaging technology that’s still going strong. You can find IRC clients for nearly every operating system on Earth. Third-party developers have created IRC apps for iPhone, so you can continue using IRC into the future. Like IM apps, IRC apps must be constantly connected to a server in order to send and receive messages, and you must sign in to the server before conducting a typed conversation.

• SMS, MMS, IM, and IRC messages also have one thing in common compared to email; the messages are much shorter. Although you might provide a complete business proposal to a client in an email, you’d be much more likely to send a short “I’m on my way home” message to your spouse in an SMS message.

• Facebook: As of July 2010, Facebook had more than 500 million users. It’s a way for many people to get together and find friends, old and new. With your iPhone, you never need to be out of touch with Facebook. Facebook requires you to log into the Facebook service and use a special Facebook app to send messages, photos, and videos to your friends.

• Twitter: Twitter answers the question “What are you doing right now?” in 140 characters or less and then displays your answer to the world. There are many Twitter apps for iPhone, so you can find one that fits your particular style of tweeting. Tweets are essentially one-way blasts of information to the world, although two-way conversations that are tweeted back and forth are common. Twitter requires a special app and a connection to the Twitter service.

Source of Information : Taking Your iPhone 4 to the Max

A Variety of Chats with iPhone