Have you considered an irc chat with a client Taffy?
I don't know exactly how they work or if they're safer from hackers and whatnot. But I used to go to two South African chat servers quite regularly using mIRC, which uses less ram than java for instance, which is great when you don't have a lot of ram heh, my pc is over 6 years old now and it's always great to not have to restart every 10 mins.