MSN Messenger Reveals 7pm is the New Elevenses For Social Global Village

Microsoft Press Release 08/07/04

Its official, with increasing numbers of friends being scattered across the global village virtual contact is rapidly taking over from face to face contact. As a result 19:00 is replacing traditional "elevenses" as the optimum time for social chat in the UK, as friends struggle to juggle long distance contact across multiple time zones, according to MSN Messenger, the UKs no.1 online instant messaging service.

MSN Messenger research into evolving friendship patterns reveals that by the time we are in our twenties and thirties at least one in six of our close friends will permanently live abroad and at any one time a third of our friendship group (35%) will be travelling overseas with work, on holiday or on a prolonged sabbatical.

"Catching up with our friends, something that used to be as simple as arranging to meet for a coffee, is now a real logistics challenge involving charting holiday plans, maps and time zones!" commented Clare Bolton, MSN Consumer Marketing Manager.

MSN Messenger has now come to the rescue by asking Dr Robert Massey, an astronomer at the Royal Observatory to solve this global village conundrum: If its party time in Sydney, breakfast time in Scandinavia and night time in Santa Monica, whens the best time to speak to multiple friends online?

Dr Massey examined time zones across 10 of the most popular global destinations for UK travellers and overlaid them with the breakdown of internet usage in each of these countries. His formula for the contacting friends across the global village is:

NT=  (NA + NB+ NC+ ND+ NE)
Dr Massey aligned all the time zones to take into account time differences between each country.

In the formula (N), the number of people online at any given time, is worked out by multiplying the active population in a country (individuals who are online regularly) by the percentage of that population who are online at the time. Adding the number online in country A to the number online in countries B, C, D and E helps one to arrives at NT - the total number online for each hour.

Using this formula, 7pm is the optimum time for todays "silent friends" to catch up with each other across the global villages multiple time zones.

MSN Messengers friendship research reveals that a many as one in three of us (32%) of us have friends that largely fall into the silent friendship category - friends that are rarely if ever seen but kept in touch with using new online communications tools such as Instant Messenger.

MSN Messenger, the free online instant messaging service that allows you to speak with up to 15 people at once, has rapidly established itself as an indispensable friendship tool with eight million people in the UK and over 130 million people worldwide using the service as a way to keep friendships alive.

MSN Messenger has also created a GMT Time Dial to help people identify the best time for them to be online with their global friends, no matter where in the world they are.

The GMT Time dial enables people to find out in an instant what time it is in any part of the world, listing countries that are up to 12 hours ahead and 11 hours behind GMT, thereby catering for every traveller, whether they are East or West of GMT.

The dial will be distributed to thousands of travellers at Gatwick airport this week and at two of the biggest gap year fairs in the country, at Bath and Bristol, in July.

Clare Bolton, MSN Consumer Marketing Manager, said: "Regular contact is the social glue of friendship but its becoming a real test of organisational and mathematical skill! By identifying Global Messenger time and with our GMT Time Dial, were giving people the best chance to speak to their friends online via MSN Messenger, no matter where they are."

The MSN Messenger Anatomy of Modern Friendship research is the result of a comprehensive study of friendship patterns of over 10,000 people in the British Isles.

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