ICQ, short for ’I Seek You’, is the father of all chats and messengers. Yahoo, Netscape/AOL, MSN came late into the picture. ICQ was first called Mirabilis and it was renamed as ICQ after it was bought by AOL. One speciality of ICQ is that your ID is not a name, but a number!

ICQ provides a lot of functionality other than chat. You will find things like Reminder, Notes, To-do, Email, PC-to-Phone in this tiny app. This has made the interface very huge in terms of the number of buttons and menus. One of the good points about ICQ is that can be used from behind corporate firewalls and proxies which are common in most institutions. Also I feel that ICQ chat is faster than Yahoo and AOL.

ICQ 2000 gives you SMS also. When you signup for ICQ, you get an SMS number. SMS messages send to this number are delivered in your ICQ window. You can reply to him right from ICQ. Message delivery is reliable and very fast. To be candid, I use ICQ more often to send SMS than to chat :) It uses the MTNSMS backbone for SMS, but unlike mtnsms.com there are no ads and also you get a desktop application with delivery notification.

Bejoy
ICQ #133198188

Software version:

ICQ2000 beta