I saw this ad banner for Yahoo Messenger today that reads; "stop typing, start talking". Yahoo are promoting new voice support within their IM client (following DialPad acquisition) and it got me wondering if people will easily migrate from IM to voice? Its a different type of communication with a different associated psychology. How much substitution will happen, or how much additional traffic will be generated will be interesting to watch. Will the IM user base hurl their keyboards out the window and replace them with USB headsets - or will they compliment their heavy IM usage with the occassional phone call.
Yahoo are going to approaching this in reverse to Skype - Skype built a heavy voice usage base and complimented this with IM (I personally found that I discarded my other IM clients in favour of skype because Skype had the the most valuable contacts - probably because Im bothered to call them, rather than IM them). So then, may be we can judge the value of a relationship by the type of communication bearer we use to interact with it?
No comments:
Post a Comment