icq history

No, i'm not going to discuss the history of icq here. I'm talking about the history icq keeps of all your messages. Aside from everything, that history has to be my favourite thing to crack open and take a walk through.

I have messages back from October 1998, and it's just amazing slogging through there and seeing how my mind worked 3 years go. The amount of things written is stupendous and the amount of time it takes me to find anything in there is incredible. It's like a mini-everything in itself.

I recently started using MSN more often, and although it seems like a very nice service, and is incredibly less bloated then icq, it doesn't automatically log your conversations for you. A pity indeed.

The icq history feature gives us a way to do something that no generation has ever been able to do before...remember the most banal, trivial things we have ever said to our friends, aquaintances and even totally random foreign people who want to chat with us.

No one should ever underestimate the nostalgia inducing power of reading over online discussions of trivialities with your first real girlfriend. While in the past, people wouild merely think about that special time when they said sweet things to each other, now you can look back and see exactly what you said, and the exact minute you said it. (Of course, that doesn't usually make it feel quite the same as when it was actually being typed).