Although in the field of Internet searches, the situation is disastrous, its market share trailing behind Google's and Yahoo's, when it comes to instant messaging MSN is the leader of the pack.

A study carried out by comScore Networks, a statistics company for digital media, shows that MSN Messenger had in February the strongest penetration worldwide, with 61 percent of global IM users utilizing the application.

In South American, MSN Messenger has the most followers, 90% of the users, leaving only 10% for the other players.

In Europe and Pacific Asia, Microsoft's client is once again market leader with a smashing percentage, 70.

However, in the United States, the most competitive IM market, the biggest players, MSN Messenger, AOL/Aim and Yahoo! Messenger, obtained an almost equal share, each of them being employed by 27-37% of the users.

Considering Microsoft solution's leading position on the IM market, the Redmond company should try and redirect some of its users to the MSN and Live portals as well. This is the only way MSN could narrow the huge difference between its search engine market share and the others.

According to the study, eighty-two million people, or 49 percent of the European online population, used IM applications to communicate online in February. In comparison, sixty-nine million people in North America, or only 37 percent of the online population, used IM during the same timeframe. Interestingly, the analysis showed that IM is most heavily used in the Latin American region, with 64 percent of the online population using IM in February.

comScore Networks also says that Skype has also gained some ground, reaching 14 percent of all the worldwide IM users, but that in the US, the solution now in eBay's garden, has only 3 percent.