ICQ
General
The forever beta software that is rumored to be going commercial half the time. The channel through which countless stupid chain letters are sent. The only message center you need. ICQ is a mean thing. It makes you do things you wouldn't do otherwise. It will make you go online just to see if anyone you know is online too, or just to see if anyone was online recently and left some message for you. The same kind of things I imagine you can end up doing if you have a mobile, fortunately it's cheaper to do that over a phone line ...
Incoming Message
I find ICQ messages a great way to communicate, they fill the gap between direct chatting and email perfectly. You still have the chat immediacy, knowledge that the other side is there and will get your message pretty much immeduiately. At the same time, there is this nice lack of feeling real-timed, you have some more time to shape your answer without seeming absent-minded ...
Message History
This is an important function for me. What would my replies look like if I couldn't refresh my mind on what the question was? Well, there'd be a whole lot more questioning back and forth, that's for sure ... Bit entertaining to look through old messages too.
Contact List
Everyone who regularly chat with everyone on their contact list raise a hand! Don't think there were too many hands raised there. The contact list is a perfect example of a list from which it is much much harder to remove people than to add them. When trying to keep your list managable anyhow, the later versions of ICQ come in really handy. The contacts on your interplanetary-sized list can now be put into groups, and each group can be opened/closed at will. When closed, you still see the number of contacts in the group, and how many of these are online. So now, you can get away for ages without deleting contacts, feels good, doesn't it?
ICQ-UIN
My universal identification number for ICQ is 12597862. Not sure exactly when that crept into my mind and rooted itself there, or why, but it did at some point. It seems your UIN is the same as the number of users at the point when you registered, that's kind of cool. Wonder if anyone's got 1, and if so, is it one of the creators?
