Strictly a one-trick pony, PeopleLink offers only one-on-one instant chat. Forget about holding multi-party conversations (though that ability may appear in a future version), transmitting files or URLs, or keeping a history of your dispatches. Instead, PeopleLink hooks you up with a friend or co-worker in a two-pane chat window, where the scrolling conversation lies at the top and your typed comments, at the bottom. As far as instant messaging is concerned, this is an intuitive and practical interface.

To be sure, this buddy list does boast some of the expected options. You can organise buddies withingroups, and the client knows when someone's on-line (though the signs are easy to miss, since status is noted simply by changing the colour of the person's name).

PeopleLink lacks a ``Do Not Disturb'', but you can switch on an ``Away from the Desk'' notice that bounces back to anyone who tries to reach you while you're out. If someone sends you an instant message while you're away from your computer, PeopleLink routes the message to your e-mail account.

PeopleLink takes a unique approach to privacy. It's one of two buddy lists to eschew a search directory of names and e-mail addresses (AOL's Instant Messenger is the other). This means there's no personal profile for snoops and potential spammers to see. To add a buddy, you must know the e-mail address they used to register with PeopleLink.

To bolster this technique, PeopleLink lets you publish your presence either to everyone or to a select list of buddies. Still, this end-around is not foolproof: A dedicated never-do-well could dig up e-mail addressesat other directories, such as Four11, and--through trial and error--determine whether you're using PeopleLink. By-permission-only buddy clients, such as ICQ and Ding, are much more secure.

Fortunately, PeopleLink also lets you deny specific people the right to see you on-line. But though it supports Windows and the Mac, and though it loads system resources lightly, PeopleLink's overall messaging skills are simply not sophisticated enough to compete with the best of our bunch.

If Excite's for-free Personal Access List (PAL) buddy looks similar to PeopleLink, don't think you've dropped a few neurons overnight. PAL and PeopleLink are, for all intents and purposes, identical. That's no surprise, since both use technology licensed from Ubique, an America On-Line subsidiary that makes Virtual Places, the avatar-based chat client.

The biggest differences between PAL and PeopleLink are the way each treats advertising and privacy. Unlike PeopleLink, PAL stitches ads into both the top of the buddy list displayand the two-pane message window used for conversation.

PAL also differs in its approach to privacy. Whereas PeopleLink requires you to know the e-mail addresses of buddies before you can add them to a list, PAL posts personal information in an on-line directory. During registration, though, you have the option to either show or hide any of this data.

One feature PAL provides and PeopleLink lacks is a ``Do Not Disturb'' sign. This feature, called Make Me Invisible, prevents others from sending you messages. However, it does not let you select specific individuals to block; you can only screen out buddies by group.

One disadvantage of PAL is that it does not provide for off-line buddies by rolling instant messages into e-mail, as PeopleLink does. PAL's essential operation and most of its other features are clones of PeopleLink's, including the fact that PAL is a instant-message-only tool. You can't hold multi-user chats or transfer files with buddies. For the full scoop, check out our PeopleLinkreview.

All buddy lists accomplish the same basic goals: they let you see which of your friends are on-line, so you can send instant messages. The clients diverge, however, in the means they use to achieve these ends.

While you register for most buddy lists with your e-mail address, it's actually your IP address that enables others to see and message you. The buddy lists ping each other at short intervals to see who's on-line. If the ping is successful, the client reports that your buddy is on-line and ready to chat.

In theory, these pings follow one of two routes, depending on what kind of buddy list you choose, peer-to-peer or client-server. Peer-to-peer works the way it sounds: Your computer makes a direct connection with your buddy's system via the Internet. Client-server buddy lists introduce a middleman: Your buddy list's server keeps track of IP addresses and routes pings and messages to individual clients.

This lack of standards causes some serious disadvantages for buddy list users. Unlikee-mail packages, which all tend to support standards such as SMTP and POP3, buddy lists from different vendors can't talk to each other. And buddies using the same software may not always be able to traverse corporate firewalls. While most buddy lists have solutions to the firewall obstacle, it may be up to your IS manager to implement them.

Buddy lists have turned heads because they do two simple things and do them well: show who's on-line and let you flash short messages back and forth. As trivial as those sound, they're a delight on the Web, where isolation is usually the name of the game. A top-flight buddy handles these chores, certainly, but how it does so is important.

You should be able to quickly add people to your list, organise those lists into groups, and tell who's on (and who's not) at a glance. A good buddy logs communications in a history file and lets you easily invite a bunch of buddies into a group chat.

All the buddy clients we reviewed are capable of online-status tracking andinstant messaging, but I-Chat Pager comes closest to our ideal.

No two buddy lists can talk to each other: ICQ's users can not communicate with Ding's, I-Chat Pager's cannot chat with LiveList's. Compounding the problem is the fact that you must manually re-create your friends-and-family list each time you change buddy clients. For this reason, you may want a buddy list that has a large installed base of users.

Picking the most popular buddy does not guarantee that you will be able to converse with more of your friends, but it's a smart first step. AOL's Instant Messenger is by far the most popular client, since it gives you access to AOL's nine million members, while ICQ claims it has more than two million members on its rolls.

Privacy is not a primary concern for some buddy list users--the convenience of quickly adding a friend to your list is one of the reasons these clients are popular--but the issue will become a crucial selling point. Buddy lists take different tacks, from PeopleLink's lack of asearchable directory to ICQ's requiring your authorisation before others can add you to their list. However, no client has yet found the perfect mix of privacy and accessibility. Out of the buddy lists we reviewed, ICQ and Ding pay the most attention to privacy concerns.

Since buddy list clients typically launch at computer start-up and remain open and active throughout the day, their impact on your PC's performance should be minimal. Look for buddy lists that consume less memory and, under Windows, fewer systems resources.

This attribute is especially attractive when circumstances force you to run multiple buddy clients, and/or when you're working on a machine with 16MB of RAM or less.

LiveList loads the PC most lightly, but PeopleLink and PAL are not far behind. Ding, meanwhile, is the memory hog among this crew.