Facebook chat and Skype for people that don’t have facebook or have it temporarily deactivated. lolzies ICQ
EDIT: I do have an MSN account that logs itself in on my computer but it’s just a list of like 400 people from high school who never go online anymore (because seriously, MSN?) with maybe like 5 people online at a time maximum since like 2007.
I have my ICQ account in pidgin also, and log into it every day. I can’t even remember the last time I talked to someone on ICQ. There are 3 contacts online now, out of 132 total.
I don’t use it, but it’s in pidgin, so… why not leave it up?
ICQ’s rise and fall is weird to think about in hindsight. They crammed so many unnecessary features into that thing, but they made no real attempts to stem the spam epidemic. What the hell were their management thinking?
After AOL bought them, did the execs immediately slap their foreheads when they remembered that they had AIM too?
They had a round of congratulatory handshakes celebrating their market share in a product category yet to be monetized, and then proceeded to largely ignore ICQ for the next several decades, letting it die a slow death.
I learned recently that ICQ has split away from AOL and is its own entity now. I’ve always added my ICQ info to Adium, Pidgeon and iChat but when I tried recently it didn’t work since they moved the servers away from AOL. Unfortunately they don’t support SSL so I haven’t used it.
I use Qt3 mostly, and some Facebook. Qt3 is waaaaaaay better than any chat system I ever used, because a monotonous diet of brief one-liners is just not that interesting. My old Yahoo Messenger online list is pretty much utterly defunct.
I still remember my ICQ number, probably because of the symmetry: 1009001. Of course there is no way to recover it. I didn’t know it was still around.
I still use my ICQ account with Adium, but only for one real reason anymore: I have a friend with an AIM account friended against my ICQ account (they let you add AIM friends after AOL bought it), and although I actually talk to her over a Yahoo account, I can tell whether she’s actually at her computer or logged in through her cell phone by whether her AIM account logs in or not (I try not to bother her when she’s just on the phone).