Engineering Messenger for real relationships : Very impressive Windows Live Stats

Piero Sierra is the Group Program Manager for Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Mail and he shares some impressive WL Messenger statistics :

…The first thing that comes to mind when you think of Windows Live Messenger is usually instant messaging – bouncing short text messages back and forth. But there are tons of things we’ve built into Messenger to make that experience more meaningful, and closer to a real face-to-face interaction. My name is Piero Sierra, and I’m the Group Program Manager for Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Mail. Today I’m going to talk about how we’ve engineered Messenger to help people stay connected with each other in more meaningful ways.

Web-based social networks have had huge growth lately, and they’re a great way to share and stay informed about what everyone that you know is up to. They let you reach out to large groups of people, including friends and family, but your social network usually also includes a broad group of acquaintances, co-workers, and people from your past that you may no longer be very close to. Messenger, on the other hand, is about the people that matter most to you – the ones you talk with frequently and share more personal moments with.

For several years now, this has been our North Star in building Messenger – helping people stay connected to their closest friends and express themselves in meaningful ways. I’d like to tell you a little more about how we’re doing that. …

… Some key stats

Our goal is to allow you to have deeper, more meaningful conversations in Messenger. So how do we measure our success? One key metric we track is conversation length – having a longer conversation means you’re generally going beyond lightweight exchanges of messages like “Are you coming?”

We also look at voice and video (our closest approximation to a true conversation), and how people interact with each other through photos. Some numbers:

  • The average length of a Messenger session (a conversation) is 9-11 minutes
  • About 59% of sessions are over 5 minutes, with about 10% over 20 minutes long
  • 1.6 billion sessions per month are over 30 minutes long
  • People use Messenger to exchange over 380 million photos a month —over 4.5 billion photos a year (this is in addition to the tens of billions of photos people also share each month via Windows Live SkyDrive and Hotmail)
  • Messenger users have 230 million voice & video conversations per month
  • Average voice session length is about 18.2 minutes
  • Average video session length is about 13.3 minutes
  • 9% of video calls and 13% of voice calls are longer than 1 hour
  • Usage of international voice and video sessions differ geographically. Brazilians use voice & video only 13% of the time for international connections while users in other countries, such as Spain or Germany, use voice and video 50-75% of the time for long distance chats with friends and family.  …

Continue at Source : Engineering Messenger for real relationships