How should I do this?

[rodneys at io.com]

I have a project that I'd like to attempt in Rev, but I don't know whether 
or no what I want to do is currently possible. So, I'm looking for 
pointers/suggestions.

I am a big fan of strategy board games (mostly German ones such as 
Settlers of Catan) and would like to create a program to play such games 
live online with other players. Most of this is fairly straightforward, 
though it will take a lot of work.

However, what I don't know how to do is have the programs on different 
computers communicate with each other. The obvious choice would seem to be 
sockets. The downside to this is that I have to have the users enter the 
IP addresses that they want to connect to. Then, I have to manually send 
the info to all addresses since there doesn't seem to be any way to 
broadcast to all open sockets. Am I wrong about this?

Also, the users need to be able to send messages to each other, both 
private and public. A built-in instant messaging type client would be 
ideal for this. It might even allow me to send all data in that way since 
I could broadcast it. Is anyone working on such a thing? Especially nice 
would be the fact that people could just open the program and look to see 
if anyone is online looking for players. There isn't an easy way to do 
this with sockets as far as I can tell. It would be nice to be able to tap 
into an existing network, such as ICQ.

This is not a commercial application, so I can't afford to pay someone to 
write the IM portion. I could make a one-time purchase of a reasonable 
library, but it would need to be cross-platform, so I really prefer 
built-in features. Is this something coming in the not too distant future?

Any pointers in the right direction or other suggestions would be 
appreciated.

Thanks,

-Rodney