The possible acquisition of Yahoo! by Microsoft is one of the biggest moves to control the Internet. It has lots of implications in the search engine space, but also in the social networking arena. Instant Messaging is certainly the grand father of all social networks: you have to add contacts and have them to accept to share presence, status message, avatar, and some additional personal pieces of information. As such, it could be a domain that will be heavily impacted by a Microsoft/Yahoo! merger.
Let’s try some guess work imagining what it could mean in the Instant Messaging space. To keep the reasoning, we will concentrate on the biggest IM services.
A bigger IM community ?
I see three possible options for the Microsoft and Yahoo! public Instant Messaging and Presence service:
- Microsoft keeps both networks: I do not think it will happen, as Microsoft has always tried to increase its MSN IM community. The advantage in having one big community is much larger than probably they keep both networks, but interconnect them (already being done in MS / Yahoo! interop programme)
- MSN Instant Messaging user base is merged inside Yahoo! service: I do not think this will happen. MSN community is bigger than Yahoo!. MSN is a very strong leader in several parts of the world. It make more sense to do the other way around.
- Yahoo! IM user base will be merged in MSN. This sounds currently the most likely to happen.
- AOL: 53 million users
- MSN: 27 million users
- Yahoo: 22 million users
- Google: 866,000 users
- AOL: 53 million users
- MSN + Yahoo!: 49 million users
- AOL: Google + all federated XMPP networks: estimated 100 millions (pessimistic figure if we trust Wikipedia article, probably more)
- What it could mean is that AOL is constrained to accelerate the move to XMPP to merge forces with XMPP players. This move seems very good for XMPP: by possibly reducing the number of proprietary protocols in the Instant Messaging world, it possibly strengthen the open standard one.
- It also makes more fragile companies whose business model rely on Instant Messaging aggregation. The less different protocols, the fewer accounts you need, the less you need aggregation tools.
Forces on the public IM battlefield
Merging the two Instant Messaging networks is not enough for MSN to become the biggest Instant Messaging network.
The best figures I found are the following: in 2006, according to Neilsen/Netratings, the market share in the public IM space was as follow:
The figures are a bit outdated, but the hierarchy is probably still the same.
As said earlier, we can expect that in a distant future MSN and Yahoo services will be at least fully and totally interoperable, if not completly merged.
Recently, it has been found that AOL was experimenting XMPP access to their service. XMPP stands for eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol and is becoming very hot. It is the same protocol that Google is using. This protocol is also used by a large federation of IM servers around the world.
It means that the battle lines are shaping up, splitting the public IM world in two or three parts, depending on these hypothesis:
AOL needs absolutely to join the XMPP front if they want to keep their leadership in Public Instant Messaging service.
Conclusions
I bet that the future of XMPP and XMPP companies is even brighter today.
