Connecting across the ether is not really new. I went to a short lecture on the history of electronic communications.

It transpired that when the early telegraph was operating across the USA the operators could recognise each other by the way they keyed morse code. So at night time when the network was not so busy some of them began chatting and found out some were male and some were female. (I assumed this was something to do with time differences too).

The rest was history.