I found that Skype was excellent for communicating with my daughter who was halfway around the world for a year. That was 2006 and was just voice. Now Skype has both chat and voice (which can be nice if you’re really missing her) capabilities. For chat, it has an advantage over MSN and AIM in that you can be connected to more than one computer and the text conversation gets logged on both. So in a way, it’s like e-mail. You answer when you can, and you don’t have to be at the computer all the time. I use it for inter-office communication. There is also an add-in for screen sharing, if that is of interest.