Windows Live Messenger – a short historyThe instant messaging category got going in earnest around 1996 with the
debut of ICQ, around the same time that Hotmail was founded. Over the
next two years, each of what are now the leading IM services launched in
rapid succession: AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, QQ,
and our own MSN Messenger. Over the following six years, instant messaging services as a
category enjoyed explosive, viral growth, ultimately reaching well over
half a billion active users sharing hundreds of billions of messages
every month. Like every major new communications paradigm over
the past 20+ years, the thirst and demand that people have to connect,
communicate, and share with one another is nearly limitless. E-mail
didn’t disrupt or reduce phone usage – it added to it. IM didn’t
disrupt or reduce e-mail – it added to it. The same goes for mobile
phones and text messaging, and the same too, for social networking over
the past 5 years. That’s interesting to keep in mind – especially for readers in the
United States, where the IM trends (and particularly Messenger’s
popularity) have been somewhat less positive. On the one hand, as users
ourselves, we’re all daily participants in the rise of Facebook,
MySpace, QQ, and the overall "social" category of web services around
the world, and it’s awesome to see our partners’ successes. Today,
social networking services as a whole drive a similar number of minutes
as e-mail or IM. Even though globally, e-mail and IM have basically
peaked and leveled off, people continue to spend roughly the same amount
of time using them, while social networks have grown to match. And even
with all of that new activity, those same people are still connecting,
communicating, and sharing more than ever with the people they care
about via IM. And yes, it really is mainly the same people – for
example, globally, 44% of people who use Facebook in a given month also
use Hotmail or Messenger in that same month, and vice versa 66% of
monthly Messenger users also use Facebook, according to Comscore................. For more pics, interesting statistics and full story, continue at Source
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