The fall and rise and rise of chat networks
I got curious and researched the history of IM, the decline of the old networks, and the rise of the new.<p>Anecdotally, I got into college (in the US) right as Facebook and Gmail opened up to everyone, and my peer group created a &quot;professional presence&quot; of Facebook and Gmail for our college lives, slowly leaving our myspace&#x2F;AIM&#x2F;WLM lives with the crazy hair and skinny jeans behind. My experience was not unique; this phenomenon has been researched by others [1][2][3][4]. Soon, Facebook and Google introduced chat, and nearly everyone I wanted to talk to was on one or both of those networks.<p>During my research, I was surprised to learn that AIM was in fact present at the iOS appstore&#x27;s launch, but I suppose there wasn&#x27;t much overlap between a typical AIM user and a typical iOS user at the time.<p>I also found an infographic from 2014 that charts some of these dates and compares the active user counts of the IM networks over the years [5].<p>Here&#x27;s a chronological timeline of selected milestones in the IM&#x2F;social space:<p>2005-09 - Meebo launches offering web access to AIM, WLM, Yahoo<p>2006-02-07 - Google Talk integration inside Gmail goes live<p>2006-03 - Nielsen&#x2F;Netratings survey for active users: AIM 53M, WLM 27M, Yahoo 22M<p>2006-07-12 - seamless interop starts between Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger<p>2006-09 - Facebook opens up to everyone (not just colleges)<p>2007-07-07 - Gmail opens up to everyone (not just invite-only)<p>2007-05-09 - Windows Live Messenger released for Xbox 360 (with dashboard update)<p>2007-12-06 - Google Talk gets limited AIM interop<p>2008-04 - Facebook chat goes live<p>2008-04-19 - Facebook overtakes Myspace in Alexa ranking<p>2008-07-11 - iOS App Store launches, AIM for iOS released<p>2008-08-26 - Facebook hits 100 million active users<p>2008-09-23 - Android 1.0 launches<p>2008-11-11 - Google Talk introduces voice and video calling<p>2008-12-22 - Meebo integrates with Facebook chat and Myspace IM<p>2009-03-31 - Skype released for iOS, Skype network has 42 million active users<p>2009-04-08 - Facebook hits 200 million active users<p>2009-06 - iOS gets push notifications<p>2009-09-15 - Facebook hits 300 million active users<p>2009-11 - WhatsApp released for iOS<p>2010-01 - WhatsApp released for BlackBerry<p>2010-02-05 - Facebook hits 400 million active users<p>2010-05 - WhatsApp released for Symbian<p>2010-05-20 - Android gets push notifications<p>2010-06-21 - FaceTime released with iOS 4<p>2010-06-21 - Windows Live Messenger released for iOS<p>2010-07-21 - Facebook hits 500 million active users<p>2010-08 - WhatsApp released for Android<p>2010-09-30 - Windows Live Messenger starts interop with Facebook Chat<p>2010-10 - Kik released<p>2010-12-02 - Viber released for iOS<p>2011-01-05 - Facebook hits 600 million active users<p>2011-01 - WeChat released<p>2011-01 - Skype for iOS introduces video calling<p>2011-04 - Facebook introduces voice calling<p>2011-05 - Viber released for Android<p>2011-05-30 - Facebook hits 700 million active users<p>2011-06 - LINE released<p>2011-07 - Facebook introduces video calling<p>2011-07 - Snapchat released for iOS<p>2011-09-22 - Facebook hits 800 million active users<p>2011-10-12 - iMessage released with iOS 5<p>2011-10-13 - Microsoft finishes acquiring Skype<p>2012-04-24 - Facebook hits 900 million active users<p>2012-07-11 - Meebo is acquired by Google and shut down<p>2012-10-29 - Snapchat released for Android<p>While it&#x27;s tempting to accuse AIM, MSN, and Yahoo for being incompetent and not catching up to the &quot;mobile era&quot;, they in fact did pursue this market as much as they were able. In truth, early iOS and Android were inferior platforms for a chat app. Push notifications were absent, data rates were expensive, and the average smartphone user at this time was not very likely to use those networks anyway.<p>Based on this info, I reason that it was truly Facebook that killed incumbent IM networks, at least in the US. Between the release of the iOS App Store and the introduction of push notifications for Android, Facebook grew by more than 300 million active users. This coincided with exodus of users from Myspace to Facebook; many of those users likely having used AIM, MSN, or Yahoo messenger in the past, now found themselves in a much larger network that also offered chat. Since Facebook largely subsumed everyone a person knew in real life, these users only had to go back to the old IM networks to chat with people they didn&#x27;t know in real life, setting the stage for the weakening of connections and these networks&#x27; decline.<p>By 2010, Facebook, or at least awareness of it, was mainstream. At the end of 2008, the Webster&#x27;s New World Dictionary named &quot;overshare&quot; as the word of the year [6], while in 2009, the New Oxford American Dictionary chose &quot;unfriend&quot; [7]. For people new to the IM landscape, the old networks were dying and full of &quot;old people&quot; now in their 20s and 30s, so new networks surfacing around this time were appealing. This contributed to the grown of Kik and Snapchat, while people for cheaper alternatives to texting and voice calls drove the adoption of Viber, WhatsApp, and Skype. iMessage went live in late 2011, offering with FaceTime a built-in rich chat on iOS, successfully capturing an audience that would&#x27;ve surely gotten a third-party app otherwise. Later, Hangouts on Android emulated this strategy.<p>Skype is a remarkable special case. Microsoft managed to squander the popularity of MSN&#x2F;WLM with its confusing product strategy, then it acquired a VOIP product that targeted a different customer base. Not content with running the two products separately, they deprecated WLM and encouraged everyone to migrate to Skype, which didn&#x27;t happen. Later, they leveraged Skype as the built-in IM for their OS, while still committed to keeping it cross-platform. It could very well be a trojan-horse into the Microsoft ecosystem, but it&#x27;s essentially entirely separate, completely unlike Google Hangouts.<p>So now we&#x27;re living in a time when smartphones come with IM out of the box, nearly every social network is gaining IM functionality (Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.), and the new wave of circa-2011 chat apps are diversifying into social networks (Snapchat) or platforms themselves (Kik, Viber, WeChat, LINE). You actively use more than product capable of IM, but rarely by choice and mostly by acclimation. Ironically, this situation benefits platforms the more closed they are, an intuition that&#x27;s made clear by complete decline of interoperability between platforms in the past. IM is ubiquitious, leaving old &quot;IM only&quot; networks owned by corporations who can&#x27;t figure out what they&#x27;re doing (AOL, Yahoo) utterly irrelevant.<p>Sources:<p>[1] 2012 <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;socialtext.dukejournals.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;30&#x2F;2_111&#x2F;99.full.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;socialtext.dukejournals.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;30&#x2F;2_111&#x2F;99.full....</a><p>[2] 2011-06-22 <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;bw&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;content&#x2F;11_27&#x2F;b4235053917570.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;bw&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;content&#x2F;11_27&#x2F;b42350539...</a><p>[3] 2007-07-11 <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;id&#x2F;19717700&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;id&#x2F;19717700&#x2F;</a><p>[4] 2009-03-16 <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newsfactor.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;Facebook-Traffic-More-Than-Doubles&#x2F;story.xhtml?story_id=10000BCLMR0W&amp;full_skip=1" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newsfactor.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;Facebook-Traffic-More-Than-Do...</a><p>[5] 2014-10-22 <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whoishostingthis.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;22&#x2F;instant-messengers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whoishostingthis.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;22&#x2F;instant-mess...</a><p>[6] 2008-12-01 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wordoftheyear.wordpress.com&#x2F;tag&#x2F;websters-new-world&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wordoftheyear.wordpress.com&#x2F;tag&#x2F;websters-new-world&#x2F;</a><p>[7] 2009-11-16 <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.oup.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;11&#x2F;unfriend&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.oup.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;11&#x2F;unfriend&#x2F;</a>