Rise of desi messengers

The Hindi MSN India has given its sixth anniversary celebrations a desi touch by launching Windows Live Messenger in Hindi and other regional languages "� Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. MSN users will thus be able to chat in their regional language with their friends and family.

The new MSN Hindi feature of Windows Live Messenger is also integrated with the MSN portal and has plenty of content of desi flavour such as film previews and interviews with the stars.

While it may have run the race fast enough, it will not be alone in this exercise for long.Rediff India already has a beta version of its messenger in Hindi in the offing.

The company apparently wanted to launch this with much hype around Hindi Diwas but was unable to do so. That's not all. There is Gaim, a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS, and Windows.

It is compatible with AIM and ICQ (Oscar protocol), MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, GroupWise Messenger and Zephyr Networks.

Yahoo! Messenger Hindi, on the other hand, has audibles, such as "Kutte, main tera khoon pi jaonga" (actor Dharmendra's favourite dialogue), which are already very popular with its users. The audibles are available in a range of mimicked voices ranging from Johnny Lever to Paresh Rawal and filmy screams of 'Nahiin' (actress Hema Malini's pet dialogue).

You may not have the new audibles if you have downloaded the US Yahoo! Messenger and not the Indian Yahoo! Messenger!

Instant messaging is very popular, especially with the youth segement. Given the fact that there are around 37 million Internet users in India (IAMAI figures), analysts estimate around 20 million users in India have downloaded and 'actively' use Instant Messengers.Yahoo! and MSN together control around 75 per cent of this market. Besides, with the newer versions, users of these IMs can talk to each other.