Instant Messaging 2011: The Year in Review

As ground and body alike tremored violently in Japan on March 11, the effects of a 9.0 magnitude earthquake near the coast of Honshu, residents and diplomats with the U.S. State Department took to their favorite IM clients, including Facebook Chat and Twitter, when telephone lines became restricted.

Instant messaging provided life-saving information, helping save lives and dissemenating news to and from the site of the quake's impact.

Equally as impactful was the role Twitter and IM played in broadcasting information out about the political upheaval of long-standing regimes in Egypt and beyond, despite media blackouts.

Nearly six months after the hullabaloo spent on ChatRoulette 2.0, the veteran IM clients spent considerable time introducing, tweaking and updating their video chat infrastructure.

While Skype introduced a whole new subscription tier in exchange for such goodies as group webcam chat, others like AIM and IMO.im were excited to introduce their own standalone video chats to be added to a growing list of free webcam sites.

• Read More: AV by AIM for Beginners
• Read More: How to Use IMO Now

While most IM clients updated their software this year to include a bevy of new features, including social networking integration, some of the greatest strides came among two of the most popular web-based IM clients: Meebo and IMO.im.

In addition to a redesign, as IMO introduced in July, Meebo added a social networking twist to its platform allowing users to now check-in and share items found on the web before sharing them with friends on the messenger, Facebook and Twitter.

After a long wait, Blackberry users finally joined friends on iPhone and Android already enjoying Facebook Chat access when the company introduced the Facebook for Blackberry 2.0 app.

Unfortunately, not all updates were helpful for IM users in 2011. The upgrade to the newest Mac OS caught many unprepared, as they found their favorite clients founds themselves on our list of IMs incompatible with OS X Lion.

Finally, Digsby exchanged hands in what was probably the year's largest IM acquisition, now owned by social networking site Tagged.

While Facebook Chat problems became even more common in 2011, as the rollout of the latest version of the social network's embedded IM client and Facebook Timeline gummed up the works for many users, Google Plus (also Google+) took dead aim as the new kid on the block.

In addition to being much stronger in terms of privacy, Google Plus's Hangouts feature with free PC-to-phone calls and Google Plus Chat could align the new social network as a real pain for Mark Zuckerberg to overcome.

Of course, an even bigger pain came from Socialbox, the Zoosk-owned instant messenger for Facebook Chat users accused to spamming people. Fortunately, as I reported, an opt-out can help curb the numerous email invites.

Meanwhile, millions of people continued to flock to Twitter to communicate in 160 characters or less, sometimes gaining a little notoriety along the way.

While 20-year-old Jefferson, Ind., City Council hopeful @ElectMattOwen made good by winning his election and @AngEngland showed us her girl power, former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner was forced to resign after tweeting nude pictures and bad customer service dude @OceanStratagy (sic) hung on long enough to his 15 minutes of fame this December for About.com to learn he loves Waste instant messenger.

Finally, the year could not end without at least one casualty, and this one came in January 2011: AIM announced they were discontinuing their AIM Chat rooms, once a staple of the AIM client. Originally, the company had moved access to AOL Desktop software, but a recent update to the software no longer included access to the AIM Chat directory.

Whether Yahoo Chat will meet a similar demise in 2012 is yet to be seen, but those chats have been abandoned by most intelligent life for awhile now.