The core technology behind XMPP was invented by Jeremie Miller in 1998, refined in the Jabber open-source community in 1999 and 2000.

Listen to his interesting interview:

We found that only half of the services provide complete encryption: AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk, IBM’s Lotus Sametime, and Skype do. To their credit, not one service says it keeps logs of the content of users’ communications (a certain lure for federal investigators or snoopy divorce attorneys). For connection logs, Microsoft alone said it keeps none at all—though Google and Skype said their logs were deleted after a short time.

Interesting is, that in AOL’s third instant messaging survey nothing is mentioned about security from user perspective.

Top IM Uses Include:

• To chat with family or friends: 87 percent
• To share photos: 38 percent
• To send celebratory wishes, such as Happy Birthday: 37 percent
• To set up weekend or evening activities: 34 percent
• To gossip: 31 percent
• To share files: 29 percent
• To flirt: 27 percent
• To make and talk to new friends I meet in chat rooms: 27 percent
• To keep in touch with family or friends oversees: 26 percent
• To communicate with others at work: 25 percent

Interest in Future Features:

• Live streaming television: 26 percent
• Music on demand: 25 percent
• Video on demand: 21 percent
• PC to Phone VOIP calling: 20 percent

Security and privacy should be a major user requirement to help secure private and work communication.

Experienced users use for example plugins like pidgin-otr (off-the-record messaging) to secure their instant messages.

Study results:
* 8% of all mobile users globally use MIM, with the highest number of users in Hong Kong (23%)
* now 11 out of every 100 messages sent by mobile devices or fixed PC globally are instant messages
* among the people who use MIM, it is the most used feature on their phone: 61% use it daily, compared to only 55% who use SMS and only 12% use email on their phone daily

Also in China and some developing countries, MIM adoption is leapfrogging other communication means.

Mobile Instant Messaging a threat for SMS?
These findings challenge the strategies of the mobile operators in European countries that have heavily benefited from SMS usage. Do they try and keep consumers focused on SMS to maintain their revenue base, or offer consumers more choice in messaging? With increasing internet functionality on new mobile phones, and MIM’s strong mass market appeal, operators may have no choice but to promote this feature more widely.

So, it’s obvious that Meebo is quite a useful solution, especially for instant messaging fans out there, and the recent stats provided by Hitwise come to confirm this. According to Heather Hopkins, VP Researcher of Hitwise UK, Meebo registered a considerable boost in popularity over the last year and its traffic doubled, being increased with no less than 110 percent.

Meebo ranked 13th among websites in the Social Networking and Forums category and 122 among All Categories of websites based on share of US Internet visits. The average session duration for the site was just over 9 minutes.

According to the stats provided by Hitwise, MSN’s Web Messenger is the second most popular web-based instant messaging client, although it lost quite an important percentage of its visitors.

The web-based instant messaging market seems to become more important for both companies and users, as top firms such as Microsoft and Yahoo are getting more involved in it while consumers prefer to use such a product instead of downloading and installing an operating system depended proprietary client application like pidgin.