Ok, well for my school research, I have to choose three Instant Messaging softwares to study.. now I thought I would take the most popular ones.. now I think I know which they are ( MSN, AIM, Yahoo ) but I really need something prooving me which is the best. So I was thinking if there was any stats around the web.. saying like MSN Messenger : 700000 downloads, Yahoo 343343 Dwls, etc..

I have tried looking on the IM softwares, but couldnt find it. I also tried googling it.. ant find anything.. or maybe I just dont have the googling skills it takes..

any help would be appreciated

(btw, I need sources of stats.. the more concrete it is, the better)

Well, download.com has some download stats for it.
But you should try to find other sources to make it more objective.

Also, you should give attention for new software.
MSN Messenger 7.5 is in the list but it doesn't have big downloads because it's new.
So, you need to take account of the release date.
One way I can think of for now is to determine the popularity by total downloads/day.

On the sidenote, the most popular software is not always the best software, imo (i.e. Kazaa).