Rarely do I spend so much time attempting to craft Google search terms with so little success. I’ve looking for information about the relative user populations of the various instant messaging protocols—how many people use AIM? Yahoo! Messenger? MSN Messenger? Jabber/XMPP?
After an hour of off-and-on rephrasing of my burning question (”instant messaging protocol breakdown”, “how many AIM users”, “IM user populations”, etc., and factorial permutations of the foregoing) I finally found a few useful (2004) articles: Jeremy Zawodny’s IM marketshare roundup, Wired News on the IM wars. The Wired article is sprinkled with Jupiter Media Metrix numbers: AIM 44M (52%); Yahoo! 19M (23%); MSN 17M (20%); ICQ 4M (5%). Obviously those percentages are a pretty fidgety, not taking into account any other messaging protocols besides the Big Four, and glossing over dual IM citizenship (a must-have nowadays, thanks to the Balkanized messaging landscape). Anyone have anything better?
