Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: AIM, MSN, YIM, ICQ
Published February 3rd, 2007 in SoftwareSupport over instant messengers is often used by small businesses. Typically those are one-man shops or companies having less then 10 employees where one person is responsible for supporting clients. Usually such companies decide on publishing this person’s preferred IM account name on the website. That’s nice but what if customers don’t use that particular IM protocol client? Would they sign up for a new account only to ask a question? I seriously doubt it.
The latest figures for the market shares on the Instant Messaging market look like this:
- AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) - 53 million active active users
- MSN (or Windows Live Messenger) - 29 million active users
- YIM (Yahoo! Instant Messenger) - 21 million active users
- ICQ (owned by AOL but not interoperable with AIM) - 15 million active users
Note that we count active users only, not total amount of accounts registered. E.g. ICQ has approximately 400 million accounts overall but most of them are currently dead.
This is not to say that AOL still dominates. What I mean is that you should still support all four IM protocols if you want your customers to be comfortable contacting you via IM. This is not difficult as there’re a lot of multi-protocol instant messaging clients like GAIM, Trillian or Miranda. You can find even more alternatives in Wikipedia.
So good luck and be closer to your clients.
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Why not just use Adium or Gaim and not worry about it.
Even if you use a multi-protocol client you still need to have an account on each of the IM networks. However I agree with you on the note that GAIM, Adium or any other client supporting all the protocols is a must have tool.