Chat

Good ol' chat programs, i've used them all extensively, so i decided i'll write my reflections of each of them.

The first chat program i used was ICQ. I must admit it was great. It took many years for MSN to get some of the features ICQ had. Some of the options i liked about ICQ was the search feature, where you could search for people with similar interests, age groups etc. If a message is sent to a user that is offline, that user will receive the message then next time they come online. I prefer the older versions of ICQ over newer ones as I feel the newer ones have too many 'wanky' features similar to that of Windows Messenger Live. It still stands strong in my mind that the best version of ICQ was 99b, the amount of cool plugins it had just made it great.

IRC was the next chat client I used. Throughout highschool we had chat rooms set up for each highschool in the area and it was a great way to catch up with people. The client i used was mIRC and once again there was many great plugins that really came in handy. Another thing i really liked about mIRC was the DCC features, or downloading. I found it as a great alternative to torrents and found I would consistently get great download speeds. All the files downloaded were legal of course *cough*.

Finally we come to MSN. To be honest, i'm not too fond of it, but I admit I do use it. More so I feel forced to use it because it seems the most popular and all my friends use it. One feature that took a very long time to be implemented was if you send a message to a person whos offline that they will receive it the next time they come on. And once again as the newer versions keep coming out they have more and more useless features which get annoying. Just give me a simple chat client dammit.

MSN is probably the easiest to set up and get chatting with though, and IRC is definately the most difficult to both set up and get used to. If your really out there to meet new people who can relate to you then maybe ICQ is the way to go. But they all have their ups and downs and ultimately you need to find the right chat client for you.