The way we connect to each other can be very interesting, or very boring and totally illrelevant. But however you look upon it, this post will provide some interesting statistics. Based on data from EQO's IM interconnect, we can see just how each major country/ continent uses instant messaging, and the percentage each client has of the market.

MSN/ Windows Live Messenger ranks top in the UK, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey. It is the 3rd most popular client in the US, after AIM and Yahoo! Messenger respectively. You can see a breakdown of all the results, plus a world map showing which IM client is the most popular in each country.

Despite the fact MSN/ Windows Live Messenger did not come top in every country on the list, it ranks well everywhere, showing a wide user base. In fact its lowest ranking was in the Russia and Saudi Arabia, with just over 10% of the market share.

Source: Global Instant Messaging Market Share - Open Data
View the PDF containing all the data