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AOL Instant Messenger
You may as well sign up if you haven’t already. AIM is the most prevalent instant messaging client around, and with IM poised to be the next big thing in personal communications, this is a good place to start. The download is fast and easy, and if you’re already an AOL user, you can use the same screen name and password. Soon you’ll have a window on your screen telling you which of your IM friends is online and available to talk. Within office workgroups, IM is taking off as a faster and easier method of communication than e-mail. Try it out.

www.aol.com/aim/

eCircles.com
eCircles.com is the place to go to build an online community (or several) for your various groups of friends and family. You can chat, share photos and music, plan events, share a calendar, broadcast e-mail announcements, and more, all for free. Your personal in-box is a summary of all the new things happening in all the eCircles to which you belong. What a great way to stay in touch with the people who matter to you. (Note: ZDNet is an investor in eCircles.com.)

http://www.ecircles.com/

eGroups
A PC Magazine Editors’ Choice, eGroups is a great choice for people who want to build and maintain a mailing list for work or fun. It’s free, has rich features, easy e-mail and Web access, sufficient archiving capabilities, and easy setup. You can even do simple polling.

http://www.egroups.com/

Homestead
The old Homestead has recently gone through a renovation, making it easier than ever for anyone to set up a small Web site. It’s easy to drag and drop content, commerce, and community elements right onto your pages; no coding or form filling is required. More than 100 elements are available. With well over 3 million sites already built, Homestead must be doing something right.

http://www.homestead.com/

PowWow
PowWow is an instant messaging client that isn’t as well known as those from AOL, Yahoo!, or MSN.com but should be, given Version 4.0’s ability to intermingle messages from PowWow, AOL, and MSN Messenger users. Now everyone you know who uses instant messaging can show up in one very full-featured PowWow window, and you can keep track of who comes from where. The window is also a minibrowser, with its own search tool and tabs that deliver Web-based information. PowWow was a recent PC Magazine Editors’ Choice, too.

http://www.powwow.com/

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