How of many of you remember Compuserve? What about Prodigy? I'm asking because, back in the good ‘ole days, they were popular services that allowed you to communicate with other people from all over the world. In many cases, they offered complementary services, such as forums or classified services, not to mention a pretty appealing user interface (for the time).
Some of you may be too young to even know about those services, but I'll go out on a limb and assume that everyone's used either AOL Instant Messenger, Skype, or Yahoo! Messenger at some point. The main thing is that they were meant to facilitate communication. In the ever-growing world of remote teams and worldwide collaboration on projects, the ability to get good, immediate feedback is critical to solving problems. Interestingly enough, all of the services that I noted above, while awesome in their own way, have taken a backseat to another medium for developers: IRC.