The Ever Growing IM Users Of The Internet

Added: 10/08/2007

People of the world today are only interested in speed; so, it seems of no surprise that email is starting to be used less. Now, do not get me wrong, email is very smooth and fast, but it is not as fast as instant messaging (IM). IM users are popping up all over the internet today and on many different servers. This kind of acts like a barrier between IM users, because people on different servers or on different networks are not allowed to IM each other. IM is changing the way we communicate on the internet.

IM users are on the rise all over the internet. This is mostly because IM is one of the fastest and easiest ways to communicate to your friends and relatives on the internet. It has proven to be a lot faster and, sometimes, more efficient than email. This is because after you connect with someone through IM, you do not have to type in their address anymore. With email you have to wait for the person to reply before you get your answer. This could be bad if you have an urgent question that needs to be answered immediately. IM is almost as good as being in the same room with somebody and carrying on a conversation. So, as you can see, there are many good reasons for IM users to be on the rise, but not everything is perfect.

Every Greek God had its weakness. This could be considered their Achilles' heel, if you will. For IM users this would be the barrier that separates them from connecting to each other on different servers. There are so many big named servers out there, everybody chooses their own one for different reasons. If you get your internet connection through AOL, there is a good chance that you will use AIM (this is AOL's IM). Maybe you get your email through Yahoo, then you may probably want to get your IM from Yahoo Messenger. On top of that, maybe your favorite search engine is Google. It could stand to reason that you would want to get your IM through Google Talk. No matter what the reason is, everyone uses different IM servers. This puts IM users at a disadvantage. The reason why this poses a problem is that many of these big named companies are very power hungry. These companies want to get the biggest user base they can. This way they can advertise to more people. So, to make sure that they get the biggest user base, if you want to talk to people that are on their network, you have to download and sign up with their IM. Maybe your mom is on Yahoo Messenger and you are on Google Talk. If you want to chat with her, you are going to have to download and sign up for Yahoo Messenger. As you can see, this could start to become a very big problem. Think about how many friends and relatives you have right now. What are the chances that they are going to choose the very same IM server. Pretty slim, huh? This means you are going to have to download and install one of every server, and, possibly, have them going on at the same time. It would be easier to have everybody on one network. This kind of defeats the purpose of IM being fast.

Either way you slice it, IM users are still going to be able to chat with each other relatively swiftly. Of course, you may be using up a lot of hard drive using all these different IM's. So the question you may need to ask yourself is, “what is the price that you are willing to pay for speed of communication while on the internet?” If you are willing to give up a little room on your computer, then I would say go ahead and get them all. If you are running an old computer, you may need all the space you can get. In this case, I would try to convince everybody to switch to the IM network that I was using so we could all chat.

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