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Weird, according to icq that account no longer exists: http://www.icq.com/people/about_me.php?uin=57134

When I plug in my uin it works. Maybe old, inactive accounts are deleted?

You agree that by posting any material or information anywhere on the ICQ Services and Information you surrender your copyright and any other proprietary right in the posted material or information. You further agree that ICQ Inc. is entitled to use at its own discretion any of the posted material or information in any manner it deems fit, including, but not limited to, publishing the material or distributing it.

[...] You agree that by posting any material or information anywhere on the ICQ Services and Information you surrender your copyright and any other proprietary right in the posted material or information. You further agree that ICQ Inc. is entitled to use at its own discretion any of the posted material or information in any manner it deems fit, including, but not limited to, publishing the material or distributing it.[...]

Seems it's not server problem (not for all at least):
Citing board post

"[...]This is a nasty ICQ6 bug, but it is fixed with a complete uninstall of all user data and reinstall.[...]"

Some other users also say that it helped. Maybe it's an organized hoax, but whatever. You may want to backup your data and try.

It appears to just be a bug, and your numbers are safe. Backup, remove, reinstall as described here: http://boards.icq.com/boards/view_messages.php?tid =4555&topic_id=2216365. YMMV

I didn't use or even installed ICQ for at least 5 years
but wanted to check if my really old account with a nice 7 digit account number was still active.
Used: http://go.icq.com/ (no installation needed) to check.. and it is still working, guess i got lucky.
Now for another 5 years of not using it (but of course wanting to keep it :)

ICQ development had nothing to do with MIT, and was developed in Tel-Aviv.

See: Wikipedia and ICQ's own website.

While we're at it: Lampel-Ziv compression (the basis for LZW) is another Israeli innovation.

BTW, ever wondered why IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and many other major computing companies have research centers in Israel (Google just announced opening their own), and just about zilch such centers elsewhere in the Middle East, despite lower labor costs in Arab countries?

This is not about web-based IM clients, its about email/IM integration!
In the last year or so, there are so many web-based im clients for every protocol out there that no-one cares about a new one, but i DO care about having IM/email integrated, also, although i find it a bit disturbing, i think the search benefits of a google engine in my chat logs are something worth to think about.

ps. By the way, ICQ had this loooong before MSN did, i used it around 1999. You can find it here: http://go.icq.com/
It used to be a Java app. now they have that as secondary (another option) and a Flash version as primary.

I'll stick with the real deal.

Yahoo lost me back when they got cocky and started shoveling crap down my throat on their search page.

ICQ was also notorious for the same thing. They were just a little too ambitious for my tastes. I wanted a product, not a marketing blitz. Wow, they've even toned it down significantly. Now all the products are neatly categories within their product search engine.

Simplicity is a good. Forcefeeding is bad.

http://www.icq.com/download/

I agree with the comments above: if he knew his ICQ account was being monitored, why wouldn't he lay low, or at least quit expanding his web of trust?

here's few links:
for MSN Messenger
for ICQ
for IRC

using GPRS isn't free either, but it's still cheaper compared to sending same amount of text over SMS

Frank Lloyd Wright developed concrete housing that reused wooden forms (the biggest expense).

http://149849284.home.icq.com/frank%20lloyd%20wrig ht.html

All steel Lustron housing were another attempt at affordable housing.

http://www.oldhouseweb.com/stories/Detailed/12270. shtml

You can still use the "old" ICQ. I'm currently using ICQ 2003b. Even ICQ 2002 works.

Click here to download.

Where I work, we design our sites to work with IE; Not my decision, but a decision none the less. One of the things that I really missed about having to use IE over FireFox is the tabs.

Enter FlashPeaks' Slimbrowser; It is simply a browser that puts IE into tabs and has the ability to use XML-based toolbars (of limited use, but still not bad). It is a good space saver on my taskbar. There are a few minor issues but they're nothing horrible.

I would imagine that AOL's IE-based browser would be more of the same, with the addition of a bunch of garbage that they usually throw in their products (Look at what happened to ICQ as an example).

For one thing, they refuse to help you if your account is compromised. My UIN was stolen a few years back. The ass who took it, spent a few weeks trying to gain information about me from my contacts. The exact same thing happened to a friend of mine a few days before me, and neither of us can even get so much as a response from anyone at AOL. At the time my UIN was listed on some Russian page offering stolen UIN's for sale. You would think that would be something AOL might want to put a stop to since it only makes them look bad. If an 8 character (max they allow) alpha numeric password isn't good enough to prevent that, then at least pay attention to people when they come looking for help. And before anyone mentions the password retrieval thing - according to it, my email address was set before there was a retrieval service so it cannot be used.

Or this or this or this. Yep, it's all been done. And they're also freaking annoying to use, IMHO.

The one thing I don't like about a thing like that is that whoever is behind the scheme might try to aggregate the "ethics score" into one single value based on their decision matrix with their weight factors.

You will probably hate me for this, but I value people more than trees. To me, "low ecological impact" is least important to me while I care a lot about the labor conditions under which the product was manufactured.

Would anyone really want to follow the advise of this 29 year old Baltimore Treehugger who calls himself "Stain" and says
SARS is the best thing that has happened to this planet since ebola virus, it's not qiute as kool, but we need less humans on this earth!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" on what products you can "ethically" buy?

The one thing I don't like about a thing like that is that whoever is behind the scheme might try to aggregate the "ethics score" into one single value based on their decision matrix with their weight factors.

You will probably hate me for this, but I value people more than trees. To me, "low ecological impact" is least important to me while I care a lot about the labor conditions under which the product was manufactured.

Would anyone really want to follow the advise of this 29 year old Baltimore Treehugger who calls himself "Stain" and says
SARS is the best thing that has happened to this planet since ebola virus, it's not qiute as kool, but we need less humans on this earth!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" on what products you can "ethically" buy?

The term "beta" has lost all useful meaning. Should we withhold judgment on ICQ because it's been in "beta" since 1994? Should we avoid trusting Google News because it's been in beta for two years?

"Beta" is just a way for a company to say "if this breaks, we don't care."

Quite simply, hire a design professional or architect. They're the ones trained in progression of space, ergonomics, lighting, accoustics, color, materials, and environmental psychology. A good work environment is much more than Aeron Chairs and free sodas.

Not anyone can design good websites (*cough*) or write good software (*cough*), so please don't think that anyone can design 3-dimensional space.

I'm sure all you web developers cringe when you see all those "home website designer" packages at Best Buy just as we do at the design-your-own-dream-home ones. We're barraged by bad design just because someone thinks they can save a dollar or two by doing it themselves...

After all, how hard could it be?

;-)

The fact that all of you are confusing AIM and ICQ is exactly where your paranoid trouble lies - those are different netwroks (still, how stupid) and as long as they are, they cater different people - the close minded, the I-need-my-fix-of-the-6-oclock-news, the Id-rather-live-in-fear-than-talk-to-someone-outsid e-of-north-america crowd of AIM, and those who actually still want to think of the world as a big place full of surprises, a world wide web indeed of ICQ users. And yes, the big bad world has porn (which can be easily blocked), and not so nice people (which can be ignored), and yeah, if you're stupid enough to talk about your boss on your work computer (or porn or anything else workplaces dont appreciate) then you have it coming. and u know what? Not chatting can be dangerous too. try the universe, you may just like it

I married my im buddy and she is now Mrs Coward ...so there you go.

Also few others did it as well.

Remembering back to 1997 when I first used ICQ, I remember that it was originally created by five young Israeli men (see ICQ History). It's interesting to note that Huminity is also a company founded by Israelis. I wonder if it is coincidence or if there is some aspect of Israeli culture that leads towards creating communication and IM software.

I loaded Gaim for the first time this morning, and I was unable to log into MSM using my hotmail.com account. I loaded Firebird so I could visit Gaim's website to see if this was a known problem, and my homepage told me all I need to know.

This isn't a major problem, there are plenty of other IM clients and networks, the problem is getting all my Windows and Mac using friends to move over to using them.

I am not bitter though, after all its their network, bandwidth and development time, but perhaps its time to renew my interest in Jabber and see exactly what it can do....

Andrew McCall.

I guess you are from US. Yahoo messenger(or even msn) wouldnt be very popular there. But thats not the case in other parts of world. Where I know(India and now Middle east) yahoo and msn are extremely popular and AIM is virtually absent. And regarding your comment on not using yahoo, its a fine idea but not practical IMHO . Because people use it and if you need to chat with them, you have to use it(or something like gaim which speaks that protocol). Also, I dont think yahoo protocol is inferior comparing to msn and all. It has some cool features like offline messaging and "invisible mode" which seems to be absent in others (atleast msn, I dont know about AIM).

ICQ has both of those features that you mentioned. It's also pretty prevelant in Australia.

I've been a hardcore netizen since 1998, when I used to dial up from my uncle's home to a text-only shell account with a 1,500 bps modem :-) I remember waiting minutes to download a single JPEG file, then transferring it to my local machine using Kermit, and opening it up in Internet Explorer 3.0 on Windows 95, only to realise that it's the wrong one! Those were the days when I learnt to use Pine and Lynx, my favourite mail/www combo.

Those were the days of Internet success stories: ICQ, Napster, Winamp. Remember ShellSock?

In a perfect geek encounter, I met bluesmoon on comp.lang.java. Google didn't even exist back then.

Now, when I look around, I see "techies" with 5-10 years of experience in the software industry and no clue what All Your Base... means :-) Clearly, these guys have been here for the money. I, however, am here because I love it. The Internet is changing lives, and I want to be responsible for some of it. Somebody give me that perfect job! :-D

I'm sorry, I just can't agree with the folks who argue that Indian software engineers with doctorate degrees making minimum wage working on outdated equipment in code sweatshops will somehow put me out of a job. I'll do it by fiddling with my 401k, IM-ing, kazooming, and playing Civ-III all day long.

Thinksecret Panther (OS 10.3) Images I'm not certian how much bandwidth I have to this location so it may not work if too many people download it. (So if someone could .Torrent it?)

For the record, I've been running ICQ for a few days now and I've got 7MB in RAM and 6MB swapped out.

There is also an ICQlite version being developed to combat the myth of massive resource usage.

Just in case anyone wanted to know.

ICQ had more features (able to msg people offline) and AIM was and is relatively featureless. Maybe that's what people like. Just the basics.

In any case, I use Trillian to log on to all the different services at once. (Jabber is another option).

For those of you complaining about ICQ bloat, there's ICQ Lite (link is to the alpha version that can communicate with AIM)

Nice troll. Well not really, and it got marked up to insightful for some reason. Way to go, moderators. Now if you'll all put down the crack pipe and read the following:

Hey, guess what? You don't have to install ICQ to talk to ICQ users. You could use one of the many Jabber clients available to you, though I don't prefer them myself. Programs such as Trillian and the free, open-source GAIM allow you to simultaneously connect to various different IM networks with relative ease now, and despite not supporting the entire feature set of these networks in the case of GAIM, is certainly preferable to having a client installed per each network.

There's also the web pager and web chat room (http://wwp.icq.com/#######, where the # signs are for the number of the user you want to contact). Send them a pager message letting them know you want to talk in their web chat, and away you go.

There's -also- a Java client on the ICQ page (over here), which you can use from just about anywhere if all you want to do is get through to people on ICQ, but the above alternatives are preferable in most cases.

There's also..oh, hey. You're probably not even reading this anyway, are you troll? You got your cute little jab in, and you've probably moved off to harass some other group. Sorry to have wasted your time with reasonable discussion.

June 12, 2003
AOL Connects AIM, ICQ Users
ByÂCraig Newell

America Online Inc. has released an alpha version of its ICQ messaging client that allows for instant messages to be exchanged between ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger users for the first time.

The software, ICQ Lite build #1211, was released Monday, according to ICQ's Web site.

Usage of ICQ has declined as of late, with many instant messaging users opting for AOL Instant Messenger. According to data from ComScore Media Metrix, only six million Internet users used ICQ in May, while more than 33 million used AOL Instant Messenger during the same period.

Several instant message users who spoke with eWEEK thought the introduction of messaging between AIM and ICQ was too little, too late. One joked, "This AIM/ICQ compatibility won't do me much good as I stopped using my ICQ account shortly before retiring my TELEX number."

In May, Microsoft and America Online announced that they would collaborate for interoperability between MSN Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger. ICQ was not mentioned in the agreement.

In Fall of 2000, a test version of AIM was released which allowed for ICQ users to message each other using the AIM software, though there was no interoperability between the two networks.

AOL bought ICQ parent Mirabilis Ltd. in 1998 for $287 million.

America Online did not respond to requests for comment.

PGP delivers an icq plugin that uses your key-ring to cummunicate pgp-encrypted if your vis-a-vis has installed pgp/icq/that plugin, too.

Q. I can send and receive messages, but am having trouble using some of the other ICQ features. Is this because I am behind a firewall? A. If you are behind a firewall, you should be able to send and receive messages, SMS, and URLs. However, you might not be able to use ICQ features that establish a direct peer-to-peer connection. The features that may not work include: File Transfer, Shared Files, ICQphone, ICQ Web Front, ICQ Voice Message, and ICQ Chat. Note: You may also have trouble launching or using ICQ's external applications, including sending and receiving game or IP telephony/voice chat requests.

What I have wondered if there is a license that is similar to the GPL except for ONE {albeit MAJOR }difference... Allow everyone the rights that the GPL gives except for a particular "group" that can be specified in the license....

example: anyone can use and distribute my software or services except for those affiliated with

1- Competitior company A
2- WTAMU.EDU students and staff
3- ARN.NET customers and employees
4- Some specific Person B (wtjoker) and their workplace (wtjoker-work)
5- Those listed at some particular url (http://example.com/bannedaccess/)

What I have wondered if there is a license that is similar to the GPL except for ONE {albeit MAJOR }difference... Allow everyone the rights that the GPL gives except for a particular "group" that can be specified in the license....

example: anyone can use and distribute my software or services except for those affiliated with

1- Competitior company A
2- WTAMU.EDU students and staff
3- ARN.NET customers and employees
4- Some specific Person B (wtjoker) and their workplace (wtjoker-work)
5- Those listed at some particular url (http://example.com/bannedaccess/)

Do any of these instant messaging systems/protocols support the exposure of a different online "status" to different groups of buddies?

Yeah, and look at what a profitable company Mirabilis became because of it!

This is irrelevant, the point is that innovation occured, without needing the incentive of patents, or any kind of guarantee of income.

However, Mirabilis was very profitable. They got a big cash buy-out from AOL. The internet-craze jackpot. $100s of millions for a handful of employees. Much more than they were worth, and so far AOL still hasn't figured out how to earn money on that stuff.

(Note, if you read the press release, it is incorrect about some things. The developement of ICQ wasn't "accelerated", it was halted (on the desktop platform), so that it wouldn't lure customers away from AOL's nascent offering. AOL felt it was absorbing what could've been a major potential competitor, 5 years later)

Yeah, and look at what a profitable company Mirabilis became because of it!

This is irrelevant, the point is that innovation occured, without needing the incentive of patents, or any kind of guarantee of income.

However, Mirabilis was very profitable. They got a big cash buy-out from AOL. The internet-craze jackpot. $100s of millions for a handful of employees. Much more than they were worth, and so far AOL still hasn't figured out how to earn money on that stuff.

(Note, if you read the press release, it is incorrect about some things. The developement of ICQ wasn't "accelerated", it was halted (on the desktop platform), so that it wouldn't lure customers away from AOL's nascent offering. AOL felt it was absorbing what could've been a major potential competitor, 5 years later)

AFAIK IM was invented by Mirabilis with ICQ. ICQ until sometime back had a huge user community but that has been changing. AOL only later acquired ICQ (in 1998?). So, AOL doesn't/shouldn't get credit for innovation in IM.

BTW AOL also has secured a patent.

On another note, I am not sure most companies require IM on an enterprise level, to much to manage, not enough ROI. It makes sense on a department level, and on a department level you do not need much more than icq qroupware, oh yah, AOL owns that. Maybe a better solution would be jabber.

The biggest draw back of IM in the corporate environment: to easy for your boss to check if you are online. :)

The morons are using a background containing solid black [lib.oh.us] when essential text on top of it is black.

Looks fine to me, but then I long ago decided that I knew my preferences better than any webmaster and forced my color scheme.

They use a number of different typefaces on pages, creating a non-uniform look, which slows down reading.

Same thing. Looks fine here.

The icons [lib.oh.us] are unintuitive or unclear. What does the icon for local history and genealogy represent? Looks like flying hot dogs to me.

I do agree, but I think that using icons on websites is just annoying anyway. I've never seen an icon at all that I think is a good idea. It's much easier to just have text links (unless you're catering to a non-English audience, perhaps, but this is a local US library). They have the text right next to each icon -- is it *that* hard to tell what's what on that page?

They link to pages that are under construction [lib.oh.us] without indicated that such is the case.

Uh..yeah? So?

From a technical standpoint (unless you have some layer of stuff that preprocesses your static pages), that's a *much* better system. If you update a page, you shouldn't track down every link to said page -- hell, they could be anywhere on the Internet.

I do agree that the fact that they used Tux on an FP site is a bit funny, but what's more likely is that the guy got all of the Tux stuff from a cheapo Web clipart collections (looking for "computer" stuff), and didn't have any idea what it meant. This isn't like the library blew zillions of dollars hiring techies...

They use ALL [lib.oh.us] CAPS [lib.oh.us] for a publication where emphasis can and should be marked in other ways.

The ALL CAPS bit is hardly that egregious. Yes, it's not the ideal mechanism, but the idea is to make a short bit of text clearly stand out and still be readable, which this successfully does. Sure, a professional publisher would get twitchy because it violates some "rules" that are reasonably-well grounded...but big deal. It does the job, which is what matters.

They use single line breaks [lib.oh.us] instead of paragraphs, which makes it very hard to read.

This is true.

It doesn't take Nostradamus to figure out that they will never keep static pages like this [lib.oh.us] updated, which will lead to large portions of the site being useless.

True enough. However, from what I can see, this is a library staff doing the work. This is not a company with a budget to hire a bunch of programmers and whatnot. I doubt anyone there has significant scripting knowledge. For the resources available, this is hardly awful.

I think the reason that I'm reluctant to criticize the site is that many sites that are considered "professional" do a far worse job than this one of holding to the spirit of HTML. They use Javascript for regular linking, they force pixel-level layout, they embed Flash bits all over. Going to this site reminded me of lots of mid-90s websites, when people still gave something of a shit about what HTML looks like. You've done a good job of finding issues with the website, and I suppose I'm a bit biased in favor of it. But even so, I wish more websites would look like this again, instead of some "professional" websites.

There's been some improvement. Designers have finally learned that websites should resize, that people don't all have Javascript/cookies/Flash on (and use fallbacks), that users are *not* going to change their resolution to view a website, that hierarchies are good, that images of text (instead of just text) are bad, that massive amounts of tables with tons of links are bad...when the initial move away from simple, HTML-2.0-ish sites started, I wasn't that thrilled, but it's started to come back around.

Som examples of sites that I really don't like (though they're considered "professional" and major sites):

ICQ. There's a lot of, uh, *stuff* on the main page. This "massive amounts of stuff on the main page" motif has survived multiple redesigns.

HotBot. Lots of stuff, ugly color scheme (which appeared after the Wired purchase of HotBot).

Sony. Nobody likes rollover menus.

RCA. Rollover menus from hell.

Kraft. Nonresizeable (and wide), rather bizarre news format (which also limits them to four news items).

BIC (Yeah, the guys that make pens). All the effort of rendering fonts into an image so that you can make a website look unreadable.

Kleenex. When I go here, I want to find out how much lotion is in a given tissue, not look at a bunch of Flash crap.

So here's why I like their website. It renders cleanly in older and text-based browsers. It's fast and small. No Javascript or pop-up menus are present. It doesn't tell you to change your resolution. It provides actual email links (i.e. you don't have to go through a form). It's fairly easy to find what you want, and the immediately useful information (library hours, telephone numbers) are right on the front page.

There are, as you've found, some issues. But I'd far rather read their website than any of the big, "professional", heavily-funded websites that I listed above.

Frankly, the only popular website that I really think has good design any more is Google, which has a team that's fanatically committed to a spartan, light interface. Everyone I talked to said that it looked out of date or old when everyone else was going bigger, flashier, and more bitmapped...and now, look who's on top. :-) People *like* simple, fast web pages, not big monstrosities.

It's true that the guy didn't say Flash, so I probably misread it. I just see the one website in a long time that gets back to the basics, and I see tons of people slamming it...it comes off wrong.

Lemme check out your own website...I'm guessing that we'd differ on some of the things you did as well.

You use frames -- I firmly feel that frames are a bad idea, and after a four year love-hate relationship (i.e. designers loved frames, viewers hated them), they pretty much went away. As such, you have to slap a "this webpage is better with browsers X, Y, and Z at the bottom of your page.

You complained about hard to read icons, yet your own site has a block of six quite unidentifiable icons. Sure, you can run the mouse over them to get the text, but then they partly cover up neighboring icons. So I pretty much end up moving the mouse over an icon, moving it away, moving it onto another one...repeat six times *just* to find out what the links on your site are.

You apparently did the ford.se site, according to your CV. This is Flash only.

You use Javascript for normal links

Your poetry page has a miniscule frame that makes it extremely difficult to read any text.

On the upsite, your site *is* accessable with older browsers, even if it's a little annoying to click through frame-related links.

Everyone has the elements that they find valuable in a website. I rather like theirs. :-)

you will also notice that certain sites on MS support still point to the benefits of "cleanly proprietary" IM technology, ie. anything untainted with any semblance of interoperability with the "great unwashed." Personally I think AIM is bloody useless and anything that allows those AIM retards to connect with me is of necessity a very horrible mistake. Just a thought. Same with that filthy ICQ that allows perverts to hunt down victims by age and by gender. Just another thought.

Well at least ICQ has a lite version with no ads (for now), and only 1.7meg and a web based client for anyone worried about bloated clients...

Well at least ICQ has a lite version with no ads (for now), and only 1.7meg and a web based client for anyone worried about bloated clients...

ICQ has a _crap_ interface (though the new ICQ 2001 is better) -- but it's very good at SMSing (or texting) folk around the world -- a service Mirabilis provides to ICQ users for free. This alone makes ICQ worth it, if lots of your friends have cellphones.

"I dont like time warner, but they give us Netscape / Mozilla, Winamp and ICQ for free. "

You do realize you can get these four programs without relying on Time Warner at all?

How are you set up that you would have to pay for them in the first place? They're all free for anyone to have, and have been for months/years.

ICQ is still in beta. I suspect ICQ will never leave beta. link

It has been by far my favourite client for Linux.