Mandy, we found yesterday while playing with it that both people have to have an online status displayed and you both have to each other in your contact list for you to completely "see" each other. Don't ask me how you can talk to someone that isn't a contact or someone with an offline status- but apparently you can! LOL
We're both online, and we're both in our contacts list (obviously) but the screenshots are still big grey boxes.
And the stupid Help Forum is all in german so that's no good.