What do you think of online chatting as a way of learning English?

Actually, the whole idea of practicing through online-chatting struck me after a friend of mine passed her IELTS with 8.0 band and the maximum effort she's done was texting with her foreign-born boyfriend. She thinks that this exact practice helped her a lot because she had more time (in comparison with usual speaking) to build proper sentences > eventually she got really accurate in English and learned quite quickly how to chose the most appropriate words and so on. 

I mean... Speaking is really cool, but when you're facing a new/serious topic to discuss... sometimes I wish I had an in-built online-dictionary in my brain to chose the right words! After such conversations I feel really badly (oh, I've made such a fool of myself) because it's highly unlikely that the person you usually communicate with will want to discuss that particular topic (where you've just failed to express yourself) another time, as it's obviously boring... But when you have had the practice of writing that, it'll seem to be much more simpler to talk that through that with 'a real' person, saying what you really think, not only what you are _able_ to say... 

So,  this is my idea :) Is there anyone who would like to chat regularly about serious and controversial topics (media, politics, justice, health systems, education, society, global terrorism, you name it) and of course day-to-day lives? Personally, I would love to!