Windows: If you ever need to control someone's activities on the computer, Activity Monitor is the app you need. This full featured monitoring tool will keep an eye on any remote PC, watching and recording keystrokes, active apps, opened webpages and more, while silently running in the background.

Mac: Looking to make new friends and use the camera on your Mac? Camfrog Video Chat lets you join live streaming video chat rooms and interact with other users. The video quality is generally very good, although it will depend on your connection and the quality of your webcam. Camfrog Video Chat gives you access to a wide range of chat rooms where you'll be able to make plenty of friends.

Pocket PC: If you want wireless but don’t fancy buying a wireless router, or if you’re trying to establish a connection away from home then get a load of WMWifiRouter. As the name suggests, the program transforms your Pocket PC into a mobile router for wireless Internet access. The free software utilises the UMTS or EDGE protocols to connect to other mobiles.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not completely against the use of SMS messaging, email, Facebook, MySpace and the like, but I much prefer good old fashioned face-to-face encounters when I talk with my buddies. The webcam is often seen as something of an arcane device these days, yet with a fast Internet connection and a decent bit of software it can help you relive the times when people actually spoke to each other.

Two of my favourite video conferencing apps are Camfrog and ooVoo and both offer you the ability to set up face-to-face chats without any hassle. Camfrog is great because it offers pixel-perfect visuals, and clear, crisp sounds so you almost feel like you're in the same room as the other person. One of the things I love most about it is that you can resize the chat windows, making it great for talking with people who have a different video resolution.

ooVoo is good for chatting with lots of people at once, and you can have up to six people involved in a video conversation at the same time (beware though because this can drain bandwidth somewhat). It's also one of the few programs of its ilk that lets you send video messages via email to a friend or a group of friends. Although the picture quality isn't quite as good as Camfrog, it more than makes up for it in terms of features such as text messaging, file sharing and blog linking.