Facebook Chat: Reports of AIM's Death Greatly Exaggerated

(MoneyWatch)  When social networking site Facebook's instant messaging service launched for select users last week, talk of Facebook Chat wholly devouring the IM industry soon followed. The New York Post ran a piece heralding the death of legacy IM client AOL Instant Messenger, which quoted Pali Capital analyst Richard Greenfield:

"From an AOL perspective, we fear that Facebook users will become addicted to Facebook chat and begin to decrease their usage of AIM."

It's an easy claim to make, but it's specious. While Facebook is moving into a competitor's market -- and its 70 million active users certainly give new product it launches some clout -- Facebook Chat is more a logical extension of the site's intranetwork communications options than an entirely new product. A largely fawning review of the service at InsideFacebook gives the details on Facebook Chat. It's pretty much what you'd expect: It allows you to send messages to Facebook friends in real time, yet it lacks a lot of the basic features that come standard on other IM services.

And despite the launch of social network giant MySpace's instant messaging service, MySpaceIM, or Google's Gmail-integrated Gtalk, AIM has remained the IM service of choice, with more than 36 million users in February of this year, according to industry watchers Nielsen Online. MySpaceIM and Gtalk, with 6 million and 2.3 million active users since their launches according to Nielsen, haven't grown fast enough to severely disrupt AIM's userbase, which has shrunk by about 1.8 percent each month since a year ago.

I'm sure I'll use Facebook Chat and realize it's a handy tool, but I don't expect it to expedite the long-coming "death" of AIM. Mashable's Stan Schroeder has the right idea, saying it feels a little silly to get so worked up about "yet another web-based instant messaging/chat service."