
Has Instant Messaging Really Declined? - OoTheNigerian
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8698174.stm
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dangrover
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.

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sjs382
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.

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notauser
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.

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ErrantX
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.

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luckyland
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.

I'm getting more mileage out of IM than ever.

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quizbiz
May I ask how you are, "getting more mileage out of IM than ever"? Everyone on
my buddy lists are always offline.

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luckyland
A lot of my buddies are applications and servers.

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jsz0
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.

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jsm386
1.5 Trillion or so texts in the US in 2009. 96.8 Billion in the UK in 2009.

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johnthedebs
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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GFischer
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.

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phreeza
> 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)

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mikeryan
Hmm in a work setting I seem to use IM all the time without a drop. But when I
think about it I guess in my personal time my IM volume has declined.

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nostromo
It's also quite possible that people are IMing about as much as they did
before, but are spending more time online.

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OoTheNigerian
I think they fail to realise that Tweeting/Status Updating, etc are forms of
IM.

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quizbiz
I don't think they are anything like what IM used to be.

