Sic Transit AOL Instant Messenger

I noticed a trend recently. When I was younger (middle school and high school, really) and I wanted to establish a digital relationship with someone, getting their AIM screen name was one of the best (and only) methods of social networking. But with friends that I've made in the last two or three years, I don't even usually have their AIM screen names. That's because instant messaging seems to be migrating to other platforms that are more broadly digitally integrated. For example, Facebook and Google Talk are becoming much more useful and popular --and in my experience, they outstrip AOL as a chat platform.

Consider this: As of 2006, had something like 50% of the market share. Anecdotal evidence suggests that AIM share of the market has decreased as Facebook and Google Talk have taken off. Further, with the development of multi-platform clients like Trillium and Adium, it becomes even easier for people to splinter from the dominant market player (which at one point was AIM) and adopt their chat platform of choice. Even now, Google offers GChat users the option to "Sign into AIM" and access their AOIL buddy lists directly from within Gmail and Google Talk. It has further just integrated video and voice chat into it's chat client.

All in all, the fragmentation of the instant messenger market is an interesting development. At one point in the late 1990s, AOL Instant Messenger was the only game in town (well, for Americans -- having lived in Canada, I realized that Europeans and Canadians do not use AIM and instead prefer MSN Messenger/Windows Live). But with the creation and integration of broader social networking platforms that offer a plethora of other services -- like Facebook and Google -- the Instant Messaging market has been thrown into a state of flux, with different users simultaneously using different platforms and using multi-platform clients like Adium just to keep up.