I couldn't live without instant messaging. I can't imagine why it took Paulo to install an IM client a week, as it would be the first thing I install on a fresh computer. What I find interesting is the differences between people when it comes to their protocol of choice - it seems to be dictated partly by where you live and when you started using the Internet, and partly by the same criteria applied to your friends. If you've had access for a long time (which I'll be defining as before home access became a big market), ICQ is likely to be your preferred means of IM (particularly in Europe and Australia, a little less so in the US). If you got online some time in, say, the past 5 or 6 years, then you'll probably use either AIM (the US) or MSN (Australia and Europe).
The second group of factors is the location and the level of "techiness" as applied to your friends - there's no point using ICQ if all the people you know use MSN. Fortunately, I'm sure all of us here use multi-protocol IM clients, but I can see how annoying it would be to juggle two or three different programs if you have a mix of friends over different protocols. In my case, all of the people on my contact list use ICQ accounts, and all of them have been using ICQ from near the beginning (although not necessarily with their original UIN). Those people who are on my very small MSN list are those who happen to use more than one system. In terms of usage, ICQ is almost dead - only a mere few million still use it, and is completely dwarfed by AIM and MSN (and that weird QQ or whatever it is they use in crazy Asialand).
What do you guys think? Is your perception to IM usage similar to mine? How is the distribution in your list?
What's twice as amusing is that AIM uses oscar, just like ICQ, yet doesn't support offline sending. *Queue over-used Rove McManus catchphrase*
I guess that's why I'm in testing, everything seems to stuff up for me for no real reason. Ok, maybe it's because I think I have better idea of how the program is supposed to work than the developers.
I think ICQ was the best IM in terms of features, I used to search for people by name and location and then look at birthdates to try to work out if they were the right person, I don't remember seeing that in any other program.
Arguably, you shouldn't be allowed to search for people, because it opens the door to spam, or possibly stalkers (incidently, I'm all for that, but I'm just stating the facts right here).
What's really odd is how the older ICQ protocols used to support multi user conferencing, but the newer ones do not (remember our difficulty trying to talk to one another using ICQ yesterday)
Paulo: gaim's about to hit 2.0, which will purportedly "fix everything wrong with it, and add new stuff". Add to the fact that a huge chunk of Google's summer of code was in gaim, hopefully the next release ought to have some seriously awesome features. Having said that, gaim is only "seriously" for linux, though. I've always liked miranda's minimal interface and plugin architecture.
Nathan: Say hi to your mum for me?
Oh, that was the other thing I liked in ICQ, you could see what multiple people were saying in a conversation as they were typing, then came along NAT, where it often didn't work or you couldn't see everyone, *sigh*
It could work again now, but I haven't seen it used for a while. =(
In addition, I don't see how NAT would affect the ability to do that.
What I miss about it isn't so much that it was practical, but that it was different to most things we had since. That and I miss seeing how other people type. It was real time, so much more responsive than MSN.
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