Social Networks, the death knell for Stand-alone IM?

I always suspected that with the advent of Social Networks like Facebook, orkut, Myspace etc. users were using Instant Messaging (IM) less and less. I recall in my high school years instant messaging was the in-thing. Especially for the 13-25 demographic instant messaging was extremely popular. Now it seems that Social
Networks have taken over which seems like an interesting throw-back to the asynchronous nature of communication like email.


Now, with Facebook's Chat Application and Google integrating Gtalk gently into Orkut, I suspect companies whose core business is IM, like Meebo will feel the pinch. Instant Messaging is still useful but might now be just a feature on a Social Network. Maybe not all demographics but the 13-30 year old web user (which is the demographic on a typical social network) will definitely not be too keen on maintaining a different friends list for Meebo (or other Web based IM clients) and one for Facebook. Sure, Meebo might develop a chat client geared for facebook like social.im but I would think that it will be hard to compete with Facebook on Facebook's turf. And a tug of war with Facebook for user visits seems like a scary prospect.


I am sure Meebo, Social.im and others have thought long and hard about this. I am curious to see how these companies evolve and adapt to the changing landscape.I had an opportunity to talk with Seth Sternberg (CEO, Meebo) whom I had invited to talk at the Stanford I don't know to CEO Business Conference. I learnt that Meebo does other things as well, like Meebo rooms which plug in nicely to Myspace, so they definitely have other tricks up their sleeve and I am sure we might see more in the months to come.

As an aside, on the topic of time spent by users online on Social Networks, I heard Max Levchin (Founder and CEO, Slide & PayPal) remark that most of this time comes from the bucket that users spend on email and other entertainment on TV. I would add stand-alone IM clients to that list.

Beauty & Intelligence

Here is a fun probability result which has to do with conditional probability. Its not very hard to see what's going on but its a fun result nonetheless. I just made up a dummy example to make it more fun :)

Lets take 2 fairly independent attributes like beauty and intelligence (It can be argued that they are not independent by appealing to genetics and preferential/unequal selection rights for species perpetuation but lets ignore that for now and think simple). Lets assume beauty and intelligence are independent.
i.e if
B=beautiful
I=intelligence

P(I)=P(I|B) ->(1)

Now, think of all the people who stick in your memory (as opposed to you forgetting them after a few days of meeting them). Lets assume (simplistically)
that the people who stick in your memory are ones who are either intelligent or beautiful.

Lets throw in some numbers.
Lets assume the prior probability of someone being beautiful is
0.4
and for someone being intelligent is 0.1
Lets assume 10% of the beautiful people are intelligent.

Say, you've met 200 individuals in your lifetime.

If we go with the assumption of you being able to recollect only people who
are intelligent or beautiful, you will remember
80+12=92 individuals

Now when you look at this sample set, lo and behold, it looks like intelligence
and beauty are negatively correlated!

This looks counterintuitive since it looks like,
P(I)=0.21
but P(I|B)=0.1
(thus violating the independence assumption in (1))

whereas in reality, the conditional probability eqns are,
P(I|B,P) < P(I|P)
where P=I U B
which is another case of selection bias at work..

Hmmm..I wonder how many people feel this way about beauty and intelligence ;)