PDF of this tutorialIM once was the domain of teenagers who had found the high-tech equivalent to passing notes in class. They used the Internet and on-line services to chat from their computers. But with 600 million messages sent a day with America Online's messaging service alone, not to mention the other IM services such as MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and Lycos Instant Messenger, use of this service has clearly moved to the mainstream as adults find messaging an easy, convenient way to communicate with friends, family, and colleagues with more immediacy than e-mail and without the expense of long-distance phone calls.
The growth of short message service (SMS) on mobile phones is another factor in IM. Now the same sort of short, chatty messages that have been sent using IM on personal computers (PCs) can be sent to mobile phones. Some Internet messaging services allow messages to be delivered to mobile phones, but most providers truly have not integrated the wireless and wireline messaging systems.
Currently, most IM services are offered as free services, with the value to the provider coming in increased hit counts to their Web sites for increased advertising revenue or as a demonstration of the power of their market-share—again as a way to add advertising revenue or commercial partnerships. While some service providers, including America Online and MSN, offer messaging services, other services are Web-based and independent of the method of Internet access. Each messaging service is based on its own standards, so there is no real interoperability between services. Users have to agree with their contacts about which services to use, or they have to subscribe to several services so they can communicate with all their contacts.
With the lines blurring between wireless and wireline Internet access and with the growth of multiservice providers, there are new opportunities for service providers to use messaging to attract and retain customers and to add new features and benefits that are not possible on today's stripped-down "fun" messaging services.
