If you are including Chat, Forums and Newsgroups in the scope, you
should consider ECF as an applicable Eclipse technology. It includes the
Presence API and Chat for instant messaging, and a Bulletin Board API is
incubating (a work in progress), which can currently access vBulletin
and phpBB forums (using "web scrapers") and I've started work privately
on an NNTP provider for accessing newsgroups through the same API.