It is still very popular in western europe, aol and yahoo messenger never made any real entry here and msn took the whole cake. More and more people are moving out to skype and facebook, but I still have a big list of contacts there.
It was really popular over here (UK), but it died out fairly quickly when Facebook took over. My girlfriend is a teacher and she says that none of her students really knew what Windows Live Messenger was; kids today stick to Facebook, BBM and some use Twitter.
