COM over Internet

Hi, I'm quite new to this and I was wondering if you could help me out. As a project I want to create a program which acts as a messenger (such as MSN Messenger). So, various users would log on to one server, and communicate with eachother. I was wondering if this is possible to be created with VB6 and COM components simply, and if so, could someone please give me some hints or a small example?

Thank you very much.

You should have your server as a DCOM component running centrally. All your clients should be connected to the same network to access your DCOM server.
One thing you can't do is call COM objects through the internet, that is why we now have SOAP :)

Andre