Hello, email, and soon good-bye

'Instant messaging is closer to the telephone, where you have interactive conversations going back and forth in real time.'

Hello, email, and
soon good-bye

Instant messaging becoming way to communicate

By Marty Beard

    Email gets credit for reviving the art of letter writing, which was cast aside when the telephone’s immediacy made it the preferred means of communication.
    Expect the letter-writing resurgence brought by email to be short-lived.
    As written correspondence was supplanted by the telephone, email likewise will be supplanted by a more instantaneous form of electronic communication: instant messaging.
    In fact, instant messaging will become the dominant method of online communication by the year 2005, according to data from the Gartner Group.
    "This represents the evolution of the internet toward an immediate method of communication, as opposed to one that is episodic," says David Strassel, manager of the Intermarket Group, which examined a number of studies on the subject from several analytical firms.
    "When you receive an email it sits in your inbox for a while before you respond to it, then the other person receives, it, reads it, maybe responds back to it. Instant messaging is closer to the telephone, where you have interactive conversations going back and forth in real time."
    Instant messaging already is used widely, and adoption rates continue to escalate.
    Globally speaking, about 200 million people use IM.
    The Gallup Poll found that just under half of internet users ages 18 and over already use instant messaging at least sometimes. More than 10 percent of adults use it frequently and 3 percent use it every time they go online.
   Thirty-five percent of U.S. IM users say that for them, the technology has at least partially replaced email as a communication medium, as Insight Express found in an August 2001 poll.
    Already, people who use IM services spend almost as much time IMing as they do emailing. According to Jupiter Media Metrix, internet users spend 20 minutes a day using instant-messaging, 54 minutes surfing the web and 27 minutes using email clients such as Microsoft Outlook.
    But for now, IM hasn’t supplanted email, and IM users still conform to the stereotype of the early adopter: young and male. Most IM users, in fact 55 percent, are male, even though men make up 49 percent of all internet users.
    Teenagers remain the biggest IM users. Sixty-four percent of wired teenagers in the U.S. have used instant messaging. Thirty-five percent of teens use it daily, and 34 percent use it several times a week. In one indication of the shape of things to come, girls ages 15 to 17 are the heaviest users of instant messaging.
    One reason that analysts expect instant messaging to replace email is that its growth is paralleling the spread of high-speed internet access. Broadband connections, which are on tap all the time, make instant messaging easier than dial-up connections do.
    Intermarket reports that about 21 million people had high-speed internet connections at home as of the end of last year, which amounts to about 20 percent of all U.S. internet users. The number of people with high-speed access grew 90 percent over the year 2000, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.
    Additionally, as Intermarket says, the internet population grew by about 30% that year.
    All this adds up to indicate that instant messaging growth will surge over the next couple of years.
    According to the study, people tend to use multiple IM applications, and the space is dominated by the three leading internet companies, AOL, Yahoo and MSN.
    For now, AOL offers the dominant instant-messaging clients, namely AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ. AOL Instant Messenger is used by 56 percent of IM users, and ICQ is used by 14 percent. MSN’s IM client is favored by 47 percent of people who IM, and 32 percent use Yahoo’s. Six percent use something else.
    AOL is the most frequently used service, with 45 percent citing it as their No. 1 choice, followed by MSN at 29 percent and Yahoo at 16 percent.
    It’s too early to tell if one of the services will emerge as the dominant platform, but the battle to rule IM is intensifying. Much as the Netscape browser lost most of its market share to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, AOL is losing market share to MSN.
    "If Gartner’s forecast is correct, and instant messaging is to become the principal communications platform, there’s a big stake in controlling the protocol," Strassel says.
    "This is going to be an extremely important component of the internet experience."

-Marty Beard is a staff writer for Media Life.

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