MySpace launches IM client

by Jordan Running May 9th 2006

Today social networking juggernaut MySpace quietly launched its long-rumored instant messaging service, MySpaceIM. Fox Interactive product manager Kareem Mayan has the scoop and screenshots on his blog. MySpaceIM is a desktop client for Windows that has a pretty minimal interface and looks pretty vanilla in terms of features. It does most of what you'd expect of an IM client like text formatting, emoticons, history, and so on, but don't expect anything fancy like VoIP. MySpaceIM is ad-supported, with a small advertisement sitting at the bottom of the contact list. According to Mayan, the only default contact is the ubiquitous Tom and your other MySpace friends can be added through a web-based interface. There's an argument to be made for automatically populating it with all of your friends, but on the other hand some people might prefer to exercise different levels of discretion for MySpaceIM than for MySpace proper. The timing of MySpaceIM's launch is interesting considering that AOL, itself a huge player in IM (and this blogger's employer), made news last night when paidContent.org posted a screenshot of its MySpace-alike AIM Pages. To download the beta version of MySpaceIM, head over to MySpace.

Tags: aim, aimpages, im, myspace, myspaceim

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Cloggin said 11:39PM on 5-09-2006

Interesting.

MySpace, unfortunately, has become the rectal itch festered from the skidmarks 'on the underpants of society.' For MySpace to crank out an instant messenger will speed up the deterioration of web style standards fuled by the low-life desingers' need to make poorly formed CSS so that everyone may have the same 4 images/surveys/links on their MySpace.

With the instant messenger now hitting the market, MySpace will prosper, sure. However, the ongoing need for web disigners to maintain web standards will be shattered by the entire MySpace community.

Just one more reason to love MySpace. Good thing they're making $13+ million per month, otherwise we'd have to band together and do something about this abonination.

Nathan said 11:30AM on 5-10-2006

from what I have seen of AOL's Myspace killer, this looks to be a last ditch effort of myspace to keep people from moving to "AOL's Myspace Killer" They should keep that name, and also figure out a way to import profiles from myspace to aol. This will make the transfer easy.

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