A lot of very big numbers

You can't argue with the power of MSN Messenger when you see numbers like this:

We explore a dataset of 30 billion conversations generated by 240 million distinct users over one month. We found that approximately 90 million distinct Messenger accounts were accessed each day and that these users produced about 1 billion conversations, with approximately 7 billion exchanged messages per day. 180 million of the 240 million active accounts had at least one conversation on the observation period. We found that 99% of the conversations occurred between 2 people, and the rest with greater numbers of participants. To our knowledge, our investigation represents the largest and most comprehensive study to date of presence and communications in an IM system. A recent report (6) estimated that approximately 12 billion instant messages are sent each day. Given the estimate and the growth of IM, we estimate that we captured approximately half of the world’s IM communication during the observation period.

Read the full report on Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network