andrewteman.org

Ok, since fellow “FIMer” Kareem Mayan posted this information over on his site, I am going to let this loose as well.

I showed this to Pete today and he was like a pit bull on a leash. He wanted to break this story on his site and I was teasing him by showing him the app and not allowing him to blog it. I felt the same way, but since I had an obligation to not to over-expose this during the beta, I had to restrain. So did Pete. So go visit his site and read some of his stuff…he deserves some extra visitors for being a good guy and keeping it quiet when I asked.

So anyways, it’s here. MySpace has dropped it’s official instant messenger program, and so far so good. Nothing overly crazy, and no painfully obvious omissions to the interface or functionality that I can see so far. The client is clean and simple, intuitive (no re-inventing the wheel here), and is basically what I would expect it to be, with some extras tossed in such as MySpace message notification and some quick links to my page and the pages of friends. My pal Eric pointed out that it would be neat to be able to instant message blog posting or comment entries, and I would have to assume that such functionality is not too far off, or at the very least, has been considered.

It sure will be interesting to see how this plays out. It seems that AOL has it’s sights set on MySpace, and is working on what might be the only legitimate threat mounted to the mammoth social networking site yet, in AIM Pages. It is no co-incidence that MySpace is dropping this app now, to try and curtail any initial bleeding that may come from the AIM Pages launch.

In a later part of my conversation with Eric, we discussed who would win in this battle between AOL and MySpace. The best analogy I was able to come up with as to why MySpace will win out initially was this. Moving your social networking page is like moving your house. It is your identity and your life…your on-line life anyways…and packing it up and taking it all to a new address is hard. Starting over in a new town is hard. You need to decorate, you need to make friends, you need to familiarize yourself with new surroundings…and that can be a real pain in the ass. People are too damn invested in MySpace and are not likely to simply uproot and move to a new on-line town simply because they use AIM for an instant messenger client.

Moving IM clients on the other hand, is like switching phone companies. Granted, it is like switching phone companies where you can only talk to people that have also switched to the same phone company, but the point is…that it is far less of an on-line lifestyle change. Hell, you can even keep using AIM and use MySpace IM along side it, as I suspect many a teen will do. Hopefully Trillian will build some interoperability in and make running both clients a snap…but until then, I think I would ease up on the “MySpace Killer” tag that seems to be attached to every story about AIM Pages. Let’s not get crazy here.