Instant Messaging and Trashing Google

According to TechCrunch Blog: The user numbers coming out on Google Talk are staggeringly terrible. Comscore usage numbers show that nearly a year after launch Google is a distant, distant 4th after MSN, Yahoo and AIM. They hold a pitiful 1% of total instant messaging market share, with 3.4 million unique users in May 2006. See the Comscore chart below for more details (I wonder where Skype IM falls in those stats). Note that Comscore does not include Google Talk usage within Gmail itself (where it is embedded), but even factoring that in, the numbers are just awful.

The NYT picked up on this as well, noting that “Google Talk chat software had only 44,000 users in June”. Om Malik notes that there have been only about a million total downloads of the client.

Where does Google go from here? I suggest they roll some heads and figure out a real product strategy.

TechCrunch

*COMMENTARY* In all honesty I wouldn't be so quick to bash Google for their lack of numbers in this quite populated technology market. It's not apparent yet what their strategy is for their client but I would put my money more into the integration of IM with the web as they have with gmail. Also I'm sceptical of these numbers from comScore, especially the AIM because dispite the growth of Yahoo! service, the majority of the messaging directors I talk to, have AIM and don't have much use of Yahoo!. Google is based on the open source XMPP protocol and as much as I've seen Jabber take busines from Micrsoft because of the flexibility of their platform, the same could rein true for public IM clients as google adds additional features to their client like voice, file transfers and the "waste of time" items like emoticons and environments... stay tuned

Enterprises failing to secure instant messaging

Despite the fact that instant messaging technology is nearly ubiquitous in the enterprise, and has been for some time, according to a new survey nearly 60% of organizations do not have any security technologies in place to defend against IM threats.

Cupertino, Calif.-based security giant Symantec Corp. surveyed 400 CIOs on their organizations' IM security policy, and found that 57% of them had no security or availability policies for their IM systems. The survey also found that only 22% of organizations archive their employees' IM messages, a serious oversight that can lead to the leakage of confidential data or other sensitive information.

Nearly all enterprises have developed email archiving, retention and inspection policies, but the survey results suggest few organizations have extended that to their IM systems.

Full article at searchsecurity.com