Facebook Chat: 1 Billion Messages Sent Per Day
Facebook launched its own IM system, FbChat, back in April 2008. Since then, it’s been working hard on adding features: It arrived on mobile phones last year, added friend lists in May and even has been experimenting with video chat. Now, it looks like that work is paying off in a big way.
Today, Facebook’s engineering team revealed that Facebook’s instant messaging (IM) system has grown like wildfire. Users now send 1 billion messages every single day. That impressive number becomes even more astounding when you consider that FbChat is barely a year old.
There’s no doubt that the milestone is big. It means that each Facebook (
) user sends an average of 4-5 IMs a day (there are a little over 200 million Facebook users). Since some users are more active than others, that means there are people sending hundreds, if not thousands, of IMs to their friends, replacing communication they used to do via emails or through other IM clients.
Facebook Chat still has a ways to go to even begin to compete with Windows Live Messenger (
), Yahoo Messenger, and the king of them all, AOL Instant Messenger. All three existed years prior to FbChat, and each supports billions of IMs (and have for many years). Yet growth is on Facebook’s side and FbChat is clearly a big benefactor.
But with integration on clients like Meebo and Digsby (), it should continue to rise as a viable IM alternative.
.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment