[King-Aaron]

> I think what killed AIM, MSN, etc. was SMS.

The United States got SMS a lot later in the piece than other countries, didn't they? From my experience the opposite of what you said appeared to be true - what started to kill SMS here was services like MSN messenger and eventually facebook etc afterwards

[sirmarksalot]

Not only that, but SMS was extremely expensive in the US. If you didn't have a text plan, they cost $0.20-$0.30 a message, and unlimited plans were in the neighborhood of $30 a month. Texting didn't really take off in the US until the prices started coming down, and that didn't start happening until Google and Apple launched their own messaging apps.