This entry was posted in the following categories: News, Web services

Source: DownloadSquad 

Today social networking juggernaut MySpace quietly launched its long-rumored instant messaging service, MySpaceIM.

Fox Interactive product manager Kareem Mayan has the scoop and screenshots on his blog.

MySpaceIM is a desktop client for Windows that has a pretty minimal interface and looks pretty vanilla in terms of features. It does most of what you'd expect of an IM client like text formatting, emoticons, history, and so on, but don't expect anything fancy like VoIP.

MySpaceIM is ad-supported, with a small advertisement sitting at the bottom of the contact list. According to Mayan, the only default contact is the ubiquitous Tom and your other MySpace friends can be added through a web-based interface.

There's an argument to be made for automatically populating it with all of your friends, but on the other hand some people might prefer to exercise different levels of discretion for MySpaceIM than for MySpace proper.

The timing of MySpaceIM's launch is interesting considering that AOL, itself a huge player in IM (and this blogger's employer), made news last night when paidContent.org posted a screenshot of its MySpace-alike AIM Pages.

To download the beta version of MySpaceIM, head over to MySpace.