According to a Wall Street Journal report, BlackBerry is weighing the benefits of spinning of its BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) instant messaging service into a separate company.

The report also indicates that BlackBerry is moving some of its executives over to the BBM team before in an effort to expand BBM’s current offerings.

Although BBM has remained an incredibly popular service for those still using a BlackBerry, the service only has about 60 million active users.  This pales in comparison to similar services like WhatsApp Messenger which boasts over 250 million users.

BlackBerry has plans to take BBM cross platform with support for Android and the iPhone coming this summer.  The big question, however, is if BBM will be able to capture market share once available to non BlackBerry users.