Networking

Instant Messaging: Global Market Share – July 2008

marco 3 Comments


There are a lot IM networks/services out there and almost every country has a favorite one (almost like social networks/community) which has the highest penetration.

The folks at EQO used their IM network to investigate on the use of IM services by country, check out Global Instant Messaging Market Share – Open Data:

It seems almost unfathomable that there can be networks with active accounts numbering in the 100 MMs to billions and total accounts certainly in the billions for which there is no detailed public market share data.

Based on EQO’s IM interconnect capability we’ve been able to take a look inside the major IM networks to see the competitive landscape and broken down the stats by country – and like any good disruptive player we thought the data should be public.

Some results from the report: AIM: USA (36% market share); GTalk: India (35%), Japan (26%) and South Africa (26%); Yahoo!IM is faved by India, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia (>50%-70%);  ICQ is strong in Germany (44%) and Russia (56%).

Very, very interesting data if you need to do some research on IM services and worldwide usage. You will miss some networks in this report though, e.g. they don’t connect to Skype – so no numbers about this service.

Do you have further insights and information about the IM market? Let us know in the comments!

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Ping.fm: Keeping your social networks in sync

marco 3 Comments

Ping.fm Logo Ping.fm is currenly in beta and trying to help you with kepping ALL your friends, followers, business contact (etc., etc.,…) up-to-date!
On the website the services describes itself as:

Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.

Use AIM, GTalk, iGoogle, WAP, iPhone/iPod Touch, SMS or E-mail and let Ping.fm relay your message to a multitude of social networking sites.

Available social networks and services are: Twitter, jaiku, Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Tumblr, Pownce, Brightkite, Xanga, Plurk, Plaxo, Linkedin, Mashable, identi.ca, more coming…

The latest additions of supported services and functionality are mentioned in their recent blog entry entitled More Features, More Awesomeness:

Alas, we bring more gifts from the Ping.fm laboratory. We have added a Yahoo! Messenger bot to our bot arsenal. So, for those Yahoo! users who were without GTalk and AIM, you now have the power of Ping!

Also, we’re proud to announce our custom URL posting capability. Now you can have ping messages delivered directly to your website! This will encourage developers to write incoming-bound scripts that will do cool stuff with your Ping messages. Just another way we’ve put the power in your hands.

Last but not least, we’ve enabled support for picture uploading.

Check them out! Use this beta code to get in: pingbewithyou
Leave a comment if you need a (current) beta code and I will update the post with the latest one.

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Google Friend Connect to be announced at Campfire One

marco Leave a comment

 UH!

Google Friend Connect

Techcrunch says:

Friend Connect is a new data portability initiative for spreading social connections around the web. It’s the third of such announcements to be made in less than a week; MySpace Data Availability and Facebook Connect are the other two.

To find out more check out the live coverage over at techcrunch. You’ll find a live videostream broadcasting from the event.

Update: Techcrunch shows now the recorded stream from the event.

A blog post by Forrester’s Charlene Li fits quiet well to this announcement from Google. She writes on her blog:

The future of social networks: Social networks will be like air

“I thought about my grade-school kids, who in 10 years will be in the midst of social network engagement. I believe they (and we) will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to ‘be social.’

This gets interesting now 🙂

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