I had submitted this as "Instant Messaging losing ground to Social Networking", which is what the article seems to say (attributing it to Paul Armstrong of PR firm Kindred).
And it does seem to match to real-world anecdotal observation :) - and people only do have so much time and attention span, after all.
It's been pretty much replaced by SMS in my life. There are a few exceptions (Girlfriend, a few friends who aren't likely to waste my time, my mom) who have my gChat user name, but it's all SMS now.
That sounds almost like the proposals to add a 1 cent cost to every e-mail sent in order to fix the spam problem.
The main objection was that you would need to get everyone to adopt the new system at the same time. But for IM, the system was already there and waiting.
Well, Facebook chat is pretty popular. I'd suggest most people are moving on to using something like that - integrated with the rest of their social media experience - as opposed to standalone clients.
Certainly in the last year, from the perspective of computer forensics, our focus has switched from MSN firmly across to Facebook chat.
Although I'm anxious for 'social networking' as we know it to disintegrate, for many people it removes a lot of the overhead of managing personal relationships.
I think that's probably at the root of IM's perceived decline.
Having said that, XMPP has really opened up tons of possibilities for IM from a tools perspective and from a point-to-multipoint perspective that isn't really apparent to the casual Internet user.
It seems like most statistics about internet usage are gathered by people who don't actually use the internet. I don't get it. How do you measure that 14% of "time online" is spent on IM? Usually when I use IM, I'm doing a couple other things.
For that matter, how do you measure "time online". That would make sense when people had dialup and would sit down and block off a chunk of time to be online. But with always-on broadband connections and 3G cards, it's much rarer to find a time when you're awake but not "online" in some capacity.
Competing networks stunted the potential of Internet IM. At one point a few years ago I was connecting to half a dozen IM networks often to talk to one or two people per service. When SMS started to become widely used I think the effort of tracking someone down on these little IM islands just wasn't worth it anymore and text messaging reached a much larger audience of people who aren't tied to their computer 24x7. There are something like 25 billion text messages sent per year these days. That offsets the 8% decline in Internet IM and then some. So as usual the predictions were mostly right but instant messaging developed in a different direction than people expected.
Skype's IM is vital for our business, it lets a team around the world collaborate without interupting each other with phone calls and yet be quicker than email
> Facebook's own instant messaging system - not covered in the UK Online Measurement habits
Thats the problem. Personally I have moved most of my social IMing there. Work is mostly Skype/gmail.
The rich environments many of the traditional networks are trying to build nobody in my circle of friends really cared about, apart from some initial novelty value(aww look i can say bye with a cute waving puppy)
I think a big part of why IM has lost so much ground to SMS and social networks is that users can easily 'disconnect' without feeling guilty about it.
Until recently, I'd always have my IM status set to invisible to avoid getting sucked into unwanted conversations - there's usually only a few people I'm actually interested in talking to. I only changed this behavior after removing everyone I didn't actually talk to, since social networks now take care of loose social connections for me and I can avoid needless banter.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 42.9 ms ] thread(the article actually touches on those differences at the end)
And it does seem to match to real-world anecdotal observation :) - and people only do have so much time and attention span, after all.
The main objection was that you would need to get everyone to adopt the new system at the same time. But for IM, the system was already there and waiting.
Certainly in the last year, from the perspective of computer forensics, our focus has switched from MSN firmly across to Facebook chat.
I think that's probably at the root of IM's perceived decline.
Having said that, XMPP has really opened up tons of possibilities for IM from a tools perspective and from a point-to-multipoint perspective that isn't really apparent to the casual Internet user.
I'm getting more mileage out of IM than ever.
For that matter, how do you measure "time online". That would make sense when people had dialup and would sit down and block off a chunk of time to be online. But with always-on broadband connections and 3G cards, it's much rarer to find a time when you're awake but not "online" in some capacity.
Thats the problem. Personally I have moved most of my social IMing there. Work is mostly Skype/gmail.
The rich environments many of the traditional networks are trying to build nobody in my circle of friends really cared about, apart from some initial novelty value(aww look i can say bye with a cute waving puppy)
Until recently, I'd always have my IM status set to invisible to avoid getting sucked into unwanted conversations - there's usually only a few people I'm actually interested in talking to. I only changed this behavior after removing everyone I didn't actually talk to, since social networks now take care of loose social connections for me and I can avoid needless banter.