Instant Messaging- Trends in who uses which service?

adambyte

adambyte

Registered
Alright, hopefully this will not turn into anything racist, prejudiced, or whatever.:

Each IM network has it's own pros and cons, this is not a debate about which network is better, or which software is better...

I'm your average California college student, age 19, living in the dorms. I, personally, use only the AIM network. Because, well, this network is the one that all my friends from high school and college are on. All my friends either have AOL accounts and/or Aim accounts. A rare few of my friends use ICQ in addition.

Is it fair to conclude that most young people, like me, use AIM? What trends do you notice? Which kind of people generally use which IM network? Where do you fit in?
 
I'm 22 and like you, all my friends/classmates use AOL/AIM. I occassionaly come across someone who uses MSN or ICQ but that's rare.
 
I'm 17 and my friends are spread. My internet friends are divided 50/50 between MSN and AIM, all but one of my 3-dimentional friends use MSN and that one exception is a die-hard IRC user.

I would say MSN has an advantage as people cannot add you without your permittion and you can mess around with your screenname as much as you want.

Anywho, MSN is what I use the most
 
MSN is very popular here. It's an OK program/network, but I don't like the fact that all your messages go through M$'s servers first.
 
Im 18 and use msn because all of my friends from school and college use it, but i use fire rather than M$'s because it's crap.
 
26yo here,
Friends as young as 20 to married with children (one with child as old as 16)...

Most use MSN Messenger and Yahoo Instant Messenger, one uses AOL and another AIM (thus I haven't played with iChat as much to see any problems some people here have).

I'm constantly logged into iChat (AOL) because it's the least obstrusive client (no dock icon, no window unless I specifically want it), and, rarely fire up the true versions of the other two messengers as the 3rd party versions annoy the heck out of me.
 
ok i am 15 and almost everyone i know you uses a msenger uses AIM and it's *caughnotbyme* *caugh* been installed on all the comps at school (whitch are, btw, macs :D)
 
AIM... well..... Adium.... all my friends from home and here at school use it. (i'm 20 and a junior in college)

randomly i'll meet someone who uses yahoo or msn, but its rare enough that i don't use either one really.
 
I've been using AIM/iChat lately and use MSN from time to time but the only IM service that truly impressed me is ICQ. Unfortunately overtime it became severely bloated, at least the Windows version did.

I used ICQ for years until I guess I grew out of the IM stage of my life. Did you know ICQ UIN numbers 10000, 20000, 30000 and so on up to 90000 were reserved for the founders of ICQ. The first ICQ user ever was assigned # 100000.

Anyway, I used to IM with Arik, one of the founders, back in 1996. Some of the founders are still always online and available to IM today. My friends and I used to make fun of Arik's brother through ICQ. He had a lower ICQ # than his brother so we'd tell him Arik felt sorry for him and that's why his # was lower. They were hilarious to IM.

Anyway, ICQ was a lot of fun back then. No IM can compare. It still has the largest user base of all IM so something must still be right there.
 
I use AIM and IRC. Most of my family use AIM simply because it's easy to use. IRC takes some time to set up, you need to be a geek to use it. I would think that most of the older nerds use IRC simply because it was the only thing around. It's kinda like I'm one of the few people who use Hewlett Packard RPN calculators. Once you get used to something, you don't want to change over to something different, even if it is better.
 
Everyone I know uses AIM. I don't talk much to people I've never met IRL online. I only have one "non-3d" friend... and we met over our webcams.

I use Adium .

AIM: Sublime Nate

BTW I'm a senior in HS.
 
I'm 20 and here at Ohio University just about everybody uses AIM. MSN has it's perks, but never seemed to get along with my G4, and ICQ is just really $*&#^@ annoying. Once in a while I'll run into someone doing the whole Yahoo messenger thing, but they seem few and far between.
 
20 second-year hon B.A.

MSN, ICQ, iChat (when Jag arrives). I just want to stay in touch with people, and the medium, unless it's fatally flawed (like Fire for example, which I hate) really doesn't matter THAT much to me.

I do however like MSN a bit above ICQ: it's faster, smaller, and like devonfers said, they do see all the messages though.

I find, however, that that function DOES mean that the you're guaranteed to see _something_, either the message, or a failure notification. Unlike ICQ where I find that regularly 10%-20% of my messages (or up to 90% on some days) just get lost somewhere along the way and never delivered (it's not a firewall thing :) )

I tried Yahoo! once, it didn't stick, and refuse to touch AOLIM.
 
I use iChat on AIMs service. Everyone I know in my area uses either AIM or has AOL. I did use AOLs AIM until I noticed it was eating almost 50 percent of my processor power, so I decided iChat would be much better to use.
 
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