If spam isn’t enough to piss you off then you’re in luck because there’s a new form of virtual agitation making its way through Europe and the U.S. and it’s only a matter of time before it permeates Canada. That new Internet affliction is spam over instant messaging, or spim for short.

Radicati Group, a technology market research firm in Palo Alto, CA, predicts that 1.2 billion spims will be sent worldwide this year, up from the 400 million sent in 2003. And although this is a mere drop in the bucket compared to the number of spams expected – 35 billion – researchers are quick to caution that spim is growing at roughly three times the rate of spam.

‘If it’s an issue around the world, you can only imagine that it’ll be on its way [to Canada],’ says Jay Aber, president of the interactive media agency 24/7. ‘And with IM and corporate IM becoming a huge tool, it’s going to translate into taking up bandwidth and being a time suck.’

Along with more junk to wade through, spim has the feel of being intimately more intrusive since the messages just pop up automatically when a user is logged in. And really, Aber says, ‘it’s just bad marketing. My sense is that anything on the Internet and anything that isn’t straight broadcast advertising is moving towards permissioning. So why would you want to send your message to people who don’t want to receive it?’

Exactly our thought.