IRC

Free Geek coders use IRC (Internet Relay Chat) to communicate with each other in real time. We use a server at freenode.net (http://freenode.net/) and communicate on the #freegeek channel.

If you are using X on a linux box, you might want to look at Xchat as a client application, but there are several to choose from.

More information on IRC can be found on the web, for instance at http://www.irchelp.org/.