There are plenty of various ways you can chat in real time to your friends online, there's ICQ, AIM, MSN, Yahoo and more are always on the way it seems. There are even programs available that allow you to speak to anyone on all the aforementioned networks with just a single program such as GAIM or Trillian. One thing they all let you do though, is chat to your friends, colleagues and family over an internet connection. They also have other features, such as file, music and photo sharing, the ability to set yourself as away or offline etc, set preferences like sound events or avatars and to view your friends as you're chatting on web cam, plus many more features that are either proprietry to the client you are using or popluar functions found in many of them. In this section we will list the big IM clients, the default smileys they use and the keyboard shortcuts used to put them in your chat window.