In this day in age most people stay in contact by sending each other emails rather than writing letters. Here you can set up your email account and inbox and send/receive emails from your peers!

Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics.

AIM is different from other clients such as Yahoo Messenger in that it does not require approval from one buddy to be added to another's buddy list. As a result, it is possible for users to keep other unsuspecting users on their buddy list to see when they are online, read their status and away messages, and read their profiles. However, one can block another user from communicating and seeing one's status; though this does not prevent the user from creating a new account that is not blocked and therefore can still track the first user's status.

Yahoo! Messenger is provided free of charge and can be downloaded and used with a generic "Yahoo! ID" which also allows access to other Yahoo! services, such as Yahoo! Mail, where users can be automatically notified when they receive new email.

Some new features are tabbed conversations, a redesign of the old emoticons, integration of Bing results, built-in video message support, HD video chat, in-line commenting of social updates, a new social photo viewer that supports commenting (for Facebook and SkyDrive photos), badges support, synchronised status updates, availability by categories, as well as integration with Facebook chat