arstechnica.com — What client do you use for instant messaging? According to a recent study by comScore Networks, there's a decent chance that it's MSN Messenger, which lassoed in 61 percent of worldwide instant messaging (IM) market share.
Apr 11, 2006 View in Crawl 4
mojoApr 12, 2006
Used to use ICQ, but then everyone switched to MSN. I'm in Canada and everyone seems to use MSN. Don't know anyone that uses AIM.
greenalienApr 12, 2006
@Blueorder: Yeah I wish they'd fix that on dig. I've replied to the wrong post on a couple of occasions too. It's not clear which post the "reply" link relates too.
duffeonApr 13, 2006
I admit it, I've only tried MSN and Trillian. But I got rid of Trillian after using it for a while because it's more complicated. And yes, people don't choose what they like more, its what their friends already have. There is no point in having AIM if everyone else in your area uses MSN. I think it divides up by region pretty well.
diggnationdevonApr 13, 2006
MSN is the best. I really would love to see AOL's AIM die.
Closed AccountApr 13, 2006
I'm quite surprised there's such little interest in privacy and security specially with something like IM which traverses every network known to man in cleartext.I've given up on the likes of MSN/Aol/Yahoo every providing us with a nice interface and clean layout. I've used gaim and it was pretty stable and nice, and you can use the encryption plugins for security. I believe there's an initial diffie-hellman key exchange to generate a shared key for encryption.I now use skype for both voice calls and chat. Skype provides something that none of the other popular services (except gaim) such as AoL, MSN, Yahoo have: encryption. Skype encryption is end to end and there's a paper analyzing it: [PDF link] <a class="user" href="http://www.skype.com/security/files/2005-031%20security%20evaluation.pdf">http://www.skype.com/security/files/2005-031%20security%20evaluation.pdf</a>
zipp425Apr 13, 2006
The thing is once you tune MSN messenger its actually a pretty good app. get a-patch, itll allow you to remove crappy stuff like ads.... course it doesnt offer cross client connections, but hey, I think it looks better than trillian.
rspeedApr 13, 2006
"If you can get file transfer with my AIM buddies to work, I'll name my next child after you."1.0I'm using a SVN build (which uses joscar) and file transfers work flawlessly.
Closed AccountApr 14, 2006
The amount of people "you know" is most likely much less than the total number of people who use instant-messaging programs. Calling them idiots because their preferred IM client is different from yours, and because "no one I know would use [name of IM client]" is stupid.Using Digglogic, I don't know you, so you must be stupid. Ha ha, only serious.
angiepApr 14, 2006
Google Talk all the way!!Forget the others!
mistergoshApr 15, 2006
@trejkaz: Well... in the new version, Live Messenger, it does support offline messaging. Besides, you can always rip all the bloat with a-patch.
icedragonMay 8, 2006
I think this is quite simple, there are much more Windows users than Mac users and from my opinion MSN is the best free IM i know, I have tried others for free, like Trillian but you get much more features with MSN, also MSN is more famous because it is automatically installed on every Windows PC. The Poll would probably show completely different results when it was only tested on Macintosh users.