Recent reports at TechCrunch have highlighted Windows Live Messenger’s leadership in the number of users on its IM network. Live Messenger is ahead of Google Talk by more people than speak Bengali in the whole world.
I’ve used IM products since ICQ burst onto the scene. Infact my first chat experience was in something called the ‘Virtual Irish Pub’ about 9 years ago - crikey there were some crazy people who used that thing. Then I moved onto Yahoo! Chat before the actual desktop client version came out. I finally started using MSN Messenger a little after Microsoft first bought HoTMaiL. Now about 95% of my buddy’s are Live Messenger users. That said, most of my ‘chatting’ actually takes place on a Mac and I’ve tried a combination of Fire, the native MSN Messenger for Mac and even iChat via Jabber.
I’m also beta testing Windows Live Mobile and have tried the IM feature there too, which is not the easiest thing to do because my chatting tends to be quite verbose and I’m not the worlds fastest T9 predictive text user. But real time SMS (as it sometimes feels) does not have the same level of enjoyment as IM via a PC.
Although having tried video calls I still find that the quality is not good enough (using MSN Messenger) and for some strange reason I revert back to text based chat. Maybe I’m still old fashioned and prefer and IM client for ‘chat’ and a phone for voice calls. 