Instant messaging has become an important part of internet time for us. We use countless hours in these places to communicate with people. MSN messenger receives a bit more popularity as this messenger used to come with the popular operating system. Yahoo, on the other hand, gained popularity because of faster and better services. Previously, the conference or group chat system that MSN had could only allow around 4 people because if you go beyond that point, it used to cause problems. However, Yahoo! offered a much better approach and I remember chatting with more than 10 people in Yahoo! without much problem. There are also claims that MSN was a bit more open to viruses but not Yahoo! This in a way makes sense because MSN had more users and so the creators of these viruses would focus more time on MSN than on Yahoo!
I have also found that Yahoo! is a bit more popular with the people outside of North America and Europe. The reason for that would be I think the fast speed that Yahoo! used to provide. MSN was very slow and even slower with dial-up internet.
Recently we have found MSN and Yahoo working together and many features of Yahoo started to appear in MSN. For instance, the new “Appear Offline” option of MSN came from Yahoo’s “invisible” option. Now-a-days, it seems like all the features of MSN are available in Yahoo and vice-versa but with just different names. People can now also chat with Yahoo contacts using MSN and MSN contacts using Yahoo!. Nevertheless, when you are chatting this way, not all features are provided to you.
Therefore, at this point, the it is hard to point out the better one. I think MSN has a larger user base at this point and so you can reach more people through MSN than Yahoo! Hence, we see more people using MSN. Therefore, the choice would come down to the flexibility of individuals. That’s exactly what we are observing now.
