Peter Cashmore, an entrepreneur and consultant who writes about Internet startups on his Mashable blog, recently said this: “I pointed out that when MySpace users aren’t on MySpace, they’re checking their email or chatting on IM. If Fox Interactive can own that time too, they’ll have 100% attention from the youth demographic. Hence, getting into the IM and email space would make perfect sense.”
It appears that MySpace agrees with Cashmore, which explains recent buzz about MySpace Messenger, an instant messaging service for users of the giant social network.
So far, MySpace has revealed little about their instant messaging service. Little is known about the service besides two screenshots that can be found on Cashmore’s Mashable blog (the link can be found below). One interesting thing that one of the screenshots reveals is a musical-note icon near the bottom of the buddy list, which intimates that there is a good possibility that users of the MySpace Messenger will be able to see the music that their friends are listening to as they chat.
No one knows whether the IM service will be closed like AIM or open source like Jabber. There are those that think the latter will be true, though there are also some who expect the Messenger service to be able to integrate with other IM services.
Om Malik, senior writer at Business 2.0, wrote about this new development on his blog, where he said, “This is the first time I think Yahoo, MSN, and AIM have some serious competition, and I predict that this will change the market share equation.”
The MySpace Messenger service will also give News Corp. more advertising space to sell to advertisers that it has recently been pursuing.
To counter these new developments, there are murmurs floating around that MySpace attempted to launch an instant messaging service last year but failed, and that the link for users to sign up (which is no longer active) and the screenshots were remnants of that effort.
Sources:
http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/
marketinginsider/wpn-50-20060313MySpace
SendingHintsAboutMessaging.html
http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/13/
technology/business2_browser0313/
http://mashable.com/2006/03/12/myspace
messenger-screenshots-emerge-launch-
imminent/
Network
