Use of IP address in messaging services.

Hey guys, I got some info. about the Instant Messaging. The messages don’t hop between MSN or Yahoo servers. The servers are just intermediary. When a person logs into his/her account from MSN or Yahoo messengers, the contact list of that person is downloaded to the messenger and the server checks to see if the people in his/her contact list are online or not and this info. too is sent to the messenger.

So when a person starts a conversation with someone, that person’s messenger (and the respective server) knows the IP address of the other person and a peer-to-peer connection is established between the two parties. [Note: The IP is already known! So how can we find this out?]

So if we know the IP address of the person we want to talk to then we can have a conversation without a messenger. We need some sort of a messaging service because we cannot find out whether the person we want to chat to is online or not and also because the IP address of most of the people change each time they log in. One advantage of an instant messaging service is that a person can find out who is online at any moment.

Does anybody know how to find out the IP of the person you are chatting without 'netstat' and making a direct connection by fooling the person or things like that? In a similar post people said that the messages hop b/w different servers, well thats wrong as there is a peer-to-peer connection b/w both the parties.

Trying to answer a few of the many questions here,
No, it does their IP address before chatting.
Yes, there are other programs you can in the place of netstat. but why?
No the messages do not hop amongst servers.
The servers in Crude Lamen's terms, simply initiate the conversation's. They walk around and find out who is online, and answer the question for your computer of who else is online. When You want to talk with someone else they tell you what to do because they already found out who is online.

I hope that made some sense to you.

And one other question aswell. Why do you wish to know the IP address of people with witch whom you are talking to?