The Internet is perhaps the most significant disruptive technology in the history of mankind. The Internet has changed the way businesses conduct their affairs. In addition, the Internet has become a vital need for almost every individual in the more developed, modern, countries.

It was not that difficult to predict how the Internet could change people’s everyday lives. E-mail technology revolutionized the way people wrote and communicated with each other. After all, it is much easier and faster for let’s say an American to type and send an E-mail to china than to handwrite and mail it there. While E-mail was a great technology, it was the Messaging technology that truly took advantage of the power of the Internet. Chatting has become very common in the past couple of years. Today, more than ever, people use chat clients to connect with their colleagues, friends, and relatives.  Chat clients allow users to communicate with others through text messages, and digital emotions among other things. But one thing that was missing from chat clients was the ability to talk to others while typing text messages. While it was very useful to be able to type messages to other users, the need for vocal communication was not completely satisfied by chat clients. Companies gradually came to realize that many “chatters” were looking for “voice chat” features in their chat clients. At first, it was difficult and expensive for chat service providers to integrate voice-chat features into their chat clients. But that all changed when VoIP came around. VoIP, which makes use of the Internet to move voice packets over the networks, allows companies to provide voice-chat service for their customers for much lower prices. Integrating VoIP into IM clients not only provides a huge saving in costs for providers and users, it also saves users a lot of time and increases their productivity.Large companies such as eBay and Google have witnessed VoIP’s potential, and they have integrated VoIP into their chat clients. Microsoft was playing catch up in this market, but they have also decided to include VoIP service with their latest version of Windows Messenger Live product. VoIP chat clients are going to put pressure on regular phone service providers to drop their prices or join other companies in providing VoIP services. A lot of people around the world are expected to join the community of “chatters” in the next decade, and with the inclusion of VoIP services with most chat clients, they will be able to have better, richer chatting experience.