I got on icq back in '97 or so, when I was getting on the Internet via SFU's freenet dial up. ICQ was, to my knowledge, one of the first consumer-oriented IM clients (I'm not including IRC and all the stuff that non-technical people had no understanding of) and I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. But after most people made the switch to the faster, lighter Y! and MSN messengers I uninstalled icq. I think, but I'm not sure, that many of my old acquaintances in Vancouver are still exclusively on icq so I just reinstalled it. Low and behold there they are, some of them anyways. But most of my contacts appear to be offline....which leads me to ask, does anyone use this thing anymore? Or have I permanently lost contact with some old acquaintances? I used to use Trillian but it was kind of a bitch, had to install patches everytime Y! changed some settings so it wouldn't log in.
3 comments:
I too used to be a big ICQ user. Today, i use it partly for nostalgic reasons, and partly to see who else still logs on. Now i can't stand their bloated software and the endless system messages from "friends" who want to be added to my contact list. Turns out those friends are just spammers who want to get me to join some online dating service or something....
Most of my friends have moved to MSN anyways. And now I just downloaded Skype....which several people tell me is quite good. We'll see....
I remember using ICQ back in 97-98 and loving it. The newer versions just eat up resources and slow everything down. Skype is cool, but MSN's audio/video conferencing works well enough. I liked how on ICQ you could leave a message for someone offline and when they came online they would get the message. oh, and i liked that little "uh oh!" and the real-time chatting (where you could see them typing), and the ability to set a contact's name to whatever you wanted.
Man all I did with Trillian was install, uninstall, login a million times. Got sick of it and I didn't like the look of the UI either.
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