Another reason why Yahoo!, Microsoft and others will come to dominate the blogosphere

Duncan Riley> I was tempted to post this picture without comment because to me it speaks a thousand words. The picture comes from Software Journal as part of a review into blogging from the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger. The review isn’t particularly interesting, but the picture…..

There are literally hundreds of millions of users using messaging software from Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL and others, and the figure continues to grow. Soon nearly every one of them is going to have extremely easy access to free blogging services at their messaging company at choice, and what’€™s more, they won’€™t have to sign up for a new account, or pay for the blogging privilege, it will be all be there ready for them to use at the click of a mouse. And despite limitations that services like Spaces and 360 have today, they won’€™t always be as limited in what they can and can’€™t do, and they will continue to improve.

I wrote back in April that the biggest threat is to SixApart, and I believe that still to be the case in consumer blogging, but today I’m going to extend this to Google and its Blogger service as well. Like SixApart’s LiveJournal, Blogger takes a lot of its users from the “consumer” blogosphere, or as some refer to it as: the journalers: those who blog for the purpose of keeping an online diary of events. The consumer blog market tends to be younger than the rest of the blogosphere, they are more likely to be open to trend setting, and are highly likely to be users of messaging services. This market is not only going to embrace blogging via instant messaging software, it already is, and the enormous join up rates to MSN Spaces is indicative of this. Yahoo! 360 is still invite only and AOL has only just released blogging capabilities with AIM to the general market. But just in case you think I’m picking on SixApart and Google alone, you’d be wrong. Services such as Xanga, My Spaces and others are going to face the same problems as teens flock to the services being used by their friends and peers, the same services that they can easily access from their Messaging services. The change is already happening, but the tidal wave is yet to hit.