10 Reasons to Switch Forward, Back to ICQ

In the U.S they use AIM, in Europe they use MSN, but the true and rightful King of the Instant Messaging world is still, without a doubt, ICQ. ICQ (a cleverly pronounced oronym of "I Seek You") was first released in November of 1996 by Mirabilis, and from it's downloadable birth contained some of the most outstanding features still unrealized in the 'modern' IM world.

1. Offline Messaging Support

It's taken nearly 10 years to bring offline messaging to the non-ICQ world. In ICQ, it didn't matter if you weren't logged in with your buddies at the same time, the messages you sent waited patiently at their doorstep for their return. When Kim, my first nerd crush, moved to Florida we began a month long binge of "Yo Mamma" jokes , and there was just something special about signing in, hearing a ship horn, a child shout, and then reading "Yo Momma so fat she needs 2 IP addresses. Looks like we missed each other again."

2. Fully Indexed & Searchable History

Pidgin, you say? Yes, Pidgin is a great instant messaging tool by AOL, oh wait, awww. AOL writes the client, runs the network, but can't even figure out how to write a text file automatically. ICQ could search across conversations, and supposedly even search across users later on. But I won't give ICQ credit for what they do now, all of the forementioned could be done while I was still wearing cordoroy slacks. Yea, that was in the 90's, you jerk.

3. File Transfers that Always Worked

They had resume too! File transfers have always been problematic for AIM, and not just between differing clients. When AIM's popularity really took flight they switched protocols, randomly stranding and stalemating users from the second most important messaging feature, after, you know, messaging. You see, in the world of 56k, trading WAD files was serious business, and usually required at least two resumes since my telephonic connection cut out every hour or so. You do the math, I fought Barney and Spider Monkeys to the sounds of Bruce Campbell.

4. Chat so Live It Came Letter By Letter

In ICQ, you could switch any conversation into a mode that made your conversations appear character per character, versus paragraph per paragraph. This. Changed. Everything. You could interupt someone before they typed out a long list of useless information (or a blog about ICQ). Once again grammar meant something, and I wasn't forced to express all of my emotions with trailing dots and incomplete math formulas... *sigh* :(

5. Visionary Social Networking and Fully Searchable Directory

What's the difference between Facebook and 10 years ago? Ten years ago it could chat too, and they called it ICQ! I could find old friends with only the knowledge of random details like their general age, sex, and location. No one needed to be online for me to find them, and thanks to Offline Messaging, no one needed to be online for me contact them. It was like Facebook, MySpace, and AIM, except no one was telling me that if I swat the bee, shot the hoop, or kissed the movie star, I was the proud owner of two new iPod Nanos.

6. True Invisible Mode

Except it actually worked and wasn't easily circumvented.

7. The Paint Board

You could open a window, paste in nearly anything from the clipboard, scribble and draw pictures, insert text, almost like it was some kind of wacky network hacked version of Photoshop.

8. Total Profile Customization

This is my first name, my last name, my location, my old location from then to then, the schools i went to and when and what i did there, and if you're a stalker here's everything you need to know. Freaking awesome, and not just for stalkers either. Oh, and ... "This was the filesize limit of an AIM avatar in 2007. Beep, beep, beep. What was ... 7kb!" In 1997, however, ICQ let you use nearly any image because they didn't hold onto the images over the network. Not too much later down the road they added the ability to hold those images on their servers too (did i mention something about a searchable directory?).

9. Total Alert Customization

I'll never forget the british accent I used to record "Amanda is quite online", and how easy it was to assign any sound to each and every person, while letting me set default sounds for strangers and less important people with the same ease. So easy to use, no wonder ... it was bought out by #1 and shelfed.

10. Forward Thinking Plugin Support

Netmeeting totally blew my family away. The entire effect of simply "send to jake, now see jake" thrilled and terrified my parents. ICQ could incorporate new, non-out-of-the-box plugins into the client that let you start video conferences, audio conferences, gaming 'conferences', and whatever else you could think of. Not only that, but if your computer was in need of additional software, the message included an embedded download link, similar to how object tags in HTML work. It was actually easier for me to install software through ICQ than searching the pre-google-ific internet.

I'll end with this, ICQ is on imdb and AIM isn't, so there! :P

Blogs
There you go! This one is worth 5 stars. An informative, yet fun read.
1420515, and Trillian does this all very well now.. but yes, ICQ was teh roxxors
The only thing ICQ couldn't do is international language support. It is still buggy, you need to jump through hoops to make it work.
And sometimes it doesn't work even after all the jumping.