Peer to Peer: Collaboration and Sharing over the Internet

ICQ and AIM

AOL’s AIM and acquired ICQ technologies currently purport to include nine of ten IM clients, the remainder a mix primarily of Yahoo and MSN users. This dominance is to a large extent due to the already “captive” user base of AOL ISP subscribers and to the acquirement in 1998 of the main IM player, Miribilis ICQ.

Bit 6.3 Registered identities invariably overstates the number of users. Many (most?) users in public IM directories have several registered identities.

Determining the real number of individual users for any IM system is difficult because people (intentionally or inadvertently) tend to have more than one identity with the system. Furthermore, because of the current lack of interoperability, the same user is typically registered ...