I don't think its any accident that social services like Twitter have lately experienced a rapid increase in adoption. Along with email, Instant Messaging was right there at the very beginning of the Web. But now, IM no longer exists in a vacuum. It's integrated in wide variety of other communications ecosystems including mobile text, social networking, blogging, status updates and feed aggregators. For me, Twitter was a toy on launch. Now that I'm addicted to Friendfeed, its utility has increased ten fold.

That's something to keep in mind as China's own IM boom continues to escalate. The China Web2.0 Review blog has posted some great stats on the phenomenon. QQ accounts for about 78% market share among totally 390 million active IM accounts in China. MSN Live Messenger has about 19 million active users, accounting for 4.9% market shared, followed by Sina UC (4.1%) and Fetion (3.7%). QQ have been very agile in using their dominance to introduce a wide variety of other integrated products. But well funded competitors are now in close pursuit, including China Mobile's Fetion service which facilitates free texting between PCs and mobiles, and Baidu's Hi platform. Two weeks after launch Baidu already claims that over 1 million people have tried their new IM service.