I have ICQ contacts for dozens of friends and former colleagues going back years, but no one is ever on line any more. I use trillian to log into several IM's at once, its just my ICQ friends who've gone dark.
ICQ used to stride the IM world like a world striding IM application. Did they all just sneak off and leave me? Is this going to be the pattern for newer "social networking" software, like bebo or piczo or myspace or facebook or twitter or flickr or even for newer IM like msn and aim? Will people eventually just move on?
I'd say that permanence and therefore interoperability are two big user needs if you're doing that stuff.
Anyway bring back ICQ I say, or perhaps I should say bring back my friends?
My ICQ number is 31592481 - killerBees()
Layers and Gateways, a historical view
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One of the major issues in building the Internet or any large network is
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Because they never bothered to shore up the great big holes that allowed spammers to send us messages non-stop on ICQ no matter what our privacy setting.
MSN and Yahoo didn't have that problem at first, although Yahoo does now.
Oh yes, now I remember, seems to have stopped now though. I guess too late for us.
Well, yeah, social networking sites (the famous Facebook for instance) seem to be the reason. As you've said it in your post - people are moving on.
I wish Polish users were like this. You see, back in the late 1990s some middle-aged bloke developed the first Polish IM - Gadu-Gadu. Although it lacks many crucial features, it's incredibly buggy and there are tons of better alternatives people still fancy that old piece of crap. No one wants to make a plunge into never messaging solutions. That's how it is over here. Any ideas how to change people's thinking? :P
Scott is right -- spammers. At least that's why I stopped signing into ICQ.
AOL bought them
I think these networks will rise and fall again. Just like fashion. It goes round in a circle. It doesn't after all cost much to keep the infrastructure alive. So instead of your kids getting into flares. They'll be digging ICQ or whatever the flavour of the month is in the future.
Your friends have not left ICQ. You just can't see them online because you're using Trillian and probably they use some other "alternative" ICQ clinet. AOL changed the protocol in favour of its new client ICQ 6. So try ICQ 6, call some of your friend ICQ users and ask them to try the new ICQ 6 bloatware (or QIP (www.qip.ru) if you would not like to waste 70 MB of RAM. ICQ was left to die by AOL. What AOL does with the protocol makes the ICQ users just leave the obsolete IMessenger.
AOL develops only AIM, though it is an obsolete technology too.
You all have been drinking too much and have forgotten a bit of history. Since the release of Windows XP , MS Messenger came pre-installed (and could only be removed via editing some registry values). This, coupled with he explosion of Internet/pc literacy use in early 2000's (+Hotmail), made everyone start using MSN. I remember that all of my friends that started getting laptops/email all instantly had an MSN address. So old-gits like us had to use MSN too. Gotta hand it to MS for getting all the market.
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