I'm not sure what everyone else's experience is, but the MSN Messenger # feels a bit inflated. I'm in Australia so MSN was the dominant chat platform in the early 2000's. But these days if I want someone to chat to -- they're going to be on FBchat and not MSN. (Which also puts MSFT in second place there behind facebook)
I honestly didn't think anyone used FBChat. You are literally the first person I've ever seen anywhere mention using it. Windows Live Messenger has a pretty good stranglehold in the business world, which is a pretty large segment of IM usage.
:) Always nice to be "cutting edge".
Facebook chat is crap - but it works (most of the time at least). It drops out, the text input is tiny, you're tied to FB, etc. But it's good enough. And I'll clarify that that is purely personal use - never used it for work.
Do Microsoft have an Intranet focused IM solution ala Lotus Sametime? Notes shops all seem to be running sametime, Exchange shops seem to be not running IM or running public Messenger.
Yes, Microsoft has Office Communicator. However, it's a terrible client, it's about on feature parity with AIM version 0.5. It doesn't even turn "http://... strings into hyperlinks.
I'm 18 and all of my friends use MSN. I'd never even heard of Facebook Chat until I saw your comment. Everyone I know uses MSN, except for my parents who use Yahoo messenger in addition to MSN but I think the Yahoo thing just comes from a different time.
It's possible that the reason MSN is so popular with my age group is that we grew up with it. MSN was completely tied in with hotmail which was the email service of choice for most of us when we were getting our first email account in the early 2000s (age 9+). Then again my 8 year old cousin also uses MSN.
Yes, FBchat serves as a quick medium to chat with friends; but once I want to go in a long chat (and may be video/audio), FBchat is unreliable (slow/disconnect).
