A report by Jupiter Media Metrix (the things people do studies on!) states that officer workers are doubling their time swapping real-time messages, with the number of minutes spent instant-messaging at work in the United States climbing to 4.9 billion while the number of unique users at work rose 34 percent to 13.4 million. Minutes of instant-messaging at home rose 48 percent to 13.6 billion minutes from a year-earlier.
"While the adoption rate of instant-messaging continues to outpace that of the Internet, the time spent using the applications demonstrates even more profoundly the significant role instant-messaging plays online," said Charles Buchwalter, vice president of media research at Jupiter Media Metrix. "We first noticed the explosive popularity of messaging in the home environment, but work-place usage is following a similar trajectory."
AOL, with its AIM and ICQ messaging services, has 41.7 million users at home, up 21 percent from a year-earlier. MSN users rose 94 percent to 18.5 million while Yahoo! users rose 25 percent to 11.9 million.
At work the race is a bit closer. AOL has 8.8 million users; MSN has about 4.8 million users and Yahoo has 3.4 million users.
Since the companies' services do not allow users of one to chat with the other, Jupiter said 29 percent of messenger users utilize two or more competing brands at home, up from 24 percent a year-earlier.
News source: Reuters
