世論 What Japan Thinks

I’ve not used an instant messenger for years and years, but my excuse is being an anti-social git. Sadly, this recent survey from the new-to-me survey organisation iBridge and published by japan.internet.com into instant messengers (IM) didn’t report on why Japanese seem to be fleeing instant messaging.

Demographics

On the 3rd of October 2008 300 members of the iBridge monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 51.0% of the sample were male, 15.3% in their twenties, 40.7% in their thirties, 29.0% in their forties, 12.7% in their fifties, and 2.3% in their sixties.

By way of comparision, just over two years ago a similar survey on instant messaging in Japan found that nearly one in three were active users.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey carried out over three days in early September by goo Research into the use of instant messenging (IM) software. 1,063 members of their internet monitor group successfully completed their private questionnaire; 46.9% of the sample was male, 22.7% in their twenties, 44.0% in their thirties, 22.7% in their forties, 8.4% in their fifties, and 2.3% in their sixties.

I’m both surprised and not surprised by how low the figure for usage at work is, namely less than 9%. Surprised because I get the impression from Slashdot that the vast majority of American workers use it, and in fact it seems to be actively encouraged in many big corporations. Not surprised, because my workplace has the network locked down pretty tight (in places…) so I expect the more common ports are blocked, although you can, of course, use most of the IM software through the HTTP port 80, but then the proxy might have blacklisted the servers. I’d better stop here before I (a) get all bitter and twisted about company policy, and (b) leak some confidential information through my bitterness and twistedness!
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