Instant messaging services like MSN Messenger became popular in the late 1990s and experienced rapid growth over the following years. By the 2000s, Messenger had over 300 million active users who communicated daily through conversations and status updates. While social media now dominates, people still spend a significant amount of time on Messenger each month communicating with close friends and family through features like emoticons, profile pictures, and shared activities. Looking ahead, Messenger will continue to evolve and integrate with social networks to facilitate sharing among its large user base.
2. Windows Live Messenger – a short history
The instant messaging category got going in
earnest around 1996 with the debut of ICQ,
around the same time that Hotmail was
founded. Over the next two years, each of
what are now the leading IM services
launched in rapid succession: AIM, Yahoo!
Messenger, QQ, and our own MSN
Messenger
5. Over the following six years, instant messaging services as
a category enjoyed explosive, viral growth, ultimately
reaching well over half a billion active users sharing
hundreds of billions of messages every month.
Like every major new communications paradigm over the
past 20+ years, the thirst and demand that people have to
connect, communicate, and share with one another is
nearly limitless. E-mail didn’t disrupt or reduce phone
usage – it added to it. IM didn’t disrupt or reduce e-mail –
it added to it. The same goes for mobile phones and text
messaging, and the same too, for social networking over
the past 5 years.
7. That’s interesting to keep in mind – especially for readers in the United States,
where the IM trends (and particularly Messenger’s popularity) have been
somewhat less positive. On the one hand, as users ourselves, we’re all daily
participants in the rise of Facebook, MySpace, QQ, and the overall "social" category
of web services around the world, and it’s awesome to see our partners’ successes.
Today, social networking services as a whole drive a similar number of minutes as e-
mail or IM. Even though globally, e-mail and IM have basically peaked and leveled
off, people continue to spend roughly the same amount of time using them, while
social networks have grown to match. And even with all of that new activity, those
same people are still connecting, communicating, and sharing more than ever with
the people they care about via IM. And yes, it really is mainly the same people –
for example, globally, 44% of people who use Facebook in a given month also use
Hotmail or Messenger in that same month, and vice versa 66% of monthly
Messenger users also use Facebook, according to Comscore.
8. The original social networks
IM services really were the original "social networks." They first popularized
the notions of viral invitations and social graphs, real-time and
asynchronous messaging with friends, sharing of status messages and
other content, online activities and casual games to enjoy with your friends,
and rich personal expression—from the humble emoticon , to winks,
nudges, and more. IM services have always been optimized for sharing
among a close circle of friends, and really pivoted around online presence
and real-time conversations more than connecting you to your content and
activities from the rest of the Web.
Combining the social focus of instant messaging with the fact that IM
clients are installed by default on the vast majority of PCs and are generally
"always on" means there's a great opportunity for collaboration and
integration between traditional IM services like Messenger and the wide
range of social networks and other sites that our joint users are already on.
You’ve already seen Windows Live and other leading IM services come out
with social networking features like our What's new feed, and there is much
more to come.
So given that basic context, let’s walk through some fun facts about
Messenger…
9. People still IM… a lot
More than 300 million people in 76 countries and 48 languages use
Messenger every month they say “I you” and “LOL” not only in
English, Spanish, German and Japanese (the first 4 languages we offered) but
also in Chinese, Estonian, Thai, Catalan, Hindi, and many more.
Messenger users now represent:
65% of all Internet users in Brazil
48% of all Internet users in Canada
48% of all Internet users in Spain
47% of all Internet users in France
40% of all Internet users in Italy
39% of all Internet users in UK
People use Messenger for 163 billion minutes every month, which is about
9.4% of all time consumers spend on the Internet worldwide.
More than 40% of our users sign in each day (more than 130 million daily
users)
Every day, those users share over 1.5 billion conversations and send more
than 9 billion messages.
And at peak times, that drives more than 40 million “simultaneous online
connections,” (the number of people signed in at the same time).
11. Status messages, profile pictures,
and other personal expression
Messenger and other instant messaging apps
really were the first places that hundreds of
millions of people started updating their
status messages for their friends, and
including emoticons and other kinds of fun
personal expression online. Messenger users
still do that a lot, right alongside more
recently popular activities like social
networking and mobile text messaging.
12. Messenger users share over 1 billion status updates every
month
Those users often click through from the Messenger client
to the Web, helping drive more than 300 million users to
Windows Live Profile, Home, and SkyDrive every month.
With the Messenger application on Facebook, you can use
the “always on” Messenger client on your PC to
automatically update your Facebook status.
Likewise, with the Windows Live web activities partnerships
with 74 sites around the world like
Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, Hyves, and more, you
can share your status updates and activities on those sites
with your Messenger friends, in the What’s New feed in the
main Messenger window.
Just like ring tones and phone skins, people love emoticons
and other forms of personal expression they use to adorn
Messenger and their IM conversations– sharing tens of
millions of profile picture updates each
month, purchasing millions of emoticon packs, and using
other fun features like Messenger scenes that add a
personal touch to how their friends see them in Messenger.
15. Looking ahead
Like Hotmail, Messenger is one of the largest scale
communication and sharing services in the world, with a
strong 10 year history of reliability, performance, and
innovation. We're particularly proud of Messenger's role in
the history of helping people connect, communicate, and
share online with the people they care about most, and
we're working hard every day on new ways for Messenger
to keep playing that role as a great partner to the modern
web ecosystem around us.
In upcoming posts we’ll talk more about how Messenger is
built, how people are using different Messenger
features, and how we’re thinking about the evolution of our
role as a social application. Until then, I hope you’ll continue
to use Messenger and to keep the feedback and comments
coming!