Note: This post is my perspective on the subject, if you feel I’m wrong feel free to correct me

I had a small Hallway chat about IM’s with some work Buddy’s about the process of IM’s according to the age . I came to afew conclusions I’d like to share with you. Some of you may say “Dhuuu !!!” but i still think its worth a post even if its outdated or old news .

If i were to look into my Net History i can see that me and my friends grew up into the IM world without anyone asking us . We got handout a floppy disc with the first icq version on it back in the late 90’s in the Israel Kings Square in tel-aviv from some dude that handed out the client on hard copy floppy 1.44mb disc and i installed it and basically started my Instant Growing up life. I used icq when i was young because it was easy to register to and i didn’t have to provide any details to register other then an email account. The program was Colorful and i got a nice (Back then Short) number that i can pass on to my Buddy’s so we can all communicate on-line without using e-mail accounts. Back in the days i didnt have a web mail account of any sort and everybody used their ISP provided email account that made it difficult to use it for your personal needs because 4 other people in my house used the same e-mail address.

A few years passed and i found that my icq list became a Huge 500 user list with 5 people i actually know and i needed something to communicate abit more “professionally” lets say. I found out about MSN Messenger . It was a crappy piece of software that made the registration process a living hell, To this very day half of the users on hotmail are people who thought you need Hotmail to register MSN messenger. I used my ISP email address yet again because it just became a Spam bucket at those times already and started collecting people i truly know personally in my real life. I used messenger extensively to communicate with my Buds without seeing alot of advertisements and without getting 5 spam messages every 2 minutes like i had on icq. Come to think of it i grew up from icq to messenger and there i started my MSN messenger life.

A few years passed and i started working in a real job after i finished the army and i started realizing that when you hand out your MSN messenger email registered address you are forced to reveal your on-line presence to everybody even if you don’t like them. Unlike ICQ messenger couldn’t communicate or had a “Appear Offline” or some invisible list to avoid people you don’t want to talk to so i started adding alot of people to my Block list. As the versions evolved it came apparent to me that My MSN messenger became my Old ICQ just with a 18+ above Tag on it with people i don’t want to talk to . Then came Gtalk…

A few years later Google decided to revolutionize the web by releasing Gtalk , Something between MSN Messenger 4 and Yahoo with the ability to send Messages and That’s it. Perfect ! Come to think of it half the functions i do IM are text based anyhow so why have the mass of all the Video/Games/Sharing/Avatar crap around it when you only need to write your Boss “Its done , Try it now” and then it became apparent to me that i grow up to Gtalk. I use gtalk today to communicate with Work Colleagues, Consult on work and basically do any work related task. Even if your away and not at the office with today’s google innovation you can use the Gmail Chat to communicate without having the client installed (That’s because they were smart enough to base the client on Jabber Open source server Platform) and I’ve been using it ever since.

So Lets sum things up in short
ICQ = 10 - 18
MSN Messenger = 18 - 24
Gtalk = 24 - Death do us apart

I know alot of people would reject to this but its from my point of view and from my personal exp’ that i had with those technologies since they popped up on the world wide web.
Feel free to correct me.

   

• BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
• « Roger waters to negotiate the return of the Abducted solider?
• » Now Thats social for ya !

• BROWSE / IN icq instant messenger
• » Meetro 0.99.1197 reviewed and bashed,Sorry…