At the end of 2003, I made a web page titled SSIP Communicator. The SSIP Communicator was a program written by Java, and it was for character-based dialogue (conversation between two persons). It was not a practical program but for education in my company. I am not sure if it was successful because I used it only once. However, I like it because it is a pretty small and well-structured communication program. Recently, a protocol called SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is used for IP telephony, video conferencing, and so on. SSIP is a similar to but much simpler than SIP.
In companies, new commers are often involved in handling complicated programs, and they may fail to grasp whole program. When I start a new project, I usually start with a program as simple as possible, and try to grasp whole system. In SSIP, I intended to try this type of practice in a protocol for conversations. It became a longer program than I had expected, but it must be shorter than other similar programs (though I was not sure if there are similar programs). The program is free to use. I hope people will use this.
P.S. You must download the program of the SSIP Communicator to use it. You could access this program easier if if was an applet. Actually, it was programmed as an applet. However, unfortunately, because of the security protection mechanism of Java, it is not so easy to run a downloaded SSIP Communicator on your computer.
The Japanese counterpart of this article is this.