Oh man, so many memories... Got ICQ in late 1998, and I remember my UIN as well, suprisingly -- unlike the dozen of mobile phone numbers I had over last 20 year

Oh man, so many memories... Got ICQ in late 1998, and I remember my UIN as well, suprisingly -- unlike the dozen of mobile phone numbers I had over last 20 years. Internet back then connected you to people who you'd not meet in everyday life, and ICQ was a new unusual place to discuss anything with them. It gave you a new view of people you knew. I remember in the last grade at school I had some intimate conversations with a female classmate, which I couldn't imagine doing at school in front of many eyes. It was a dating and meeting app too: rando people would write to other random people. Although these talks were superficial and today I'd see them disenchanting, back then it was an interesting alternatives to offline sociality. A recall from 2003: me and sister having desktop computers, chatting with all the people on neighborhood LAN and sometimes messaging each other over ICQ -- too busy to walk to the next room and speak. Then I used it at office work, mostly to appoint dates with girls from another department. At the time, in 2007, it wasn't exclusive anymore, but like a mark of being web-literate, and girls were easier about telling you a UIN rather than a phone. Then social networks came, and even before mobile integration they were much richer -- all the life went there. Ah, good old days -- make a party, do stupid contests, take photos with a soapbox digital camera, and then pour the entire SD card in the meeting album -- no editing, no removal of closed or red eyed faces, or weird postures or opened mouths. Just let everyone see how fooly they were. And what was different from ICQ was that everybody was aware that everybody was aware. ICQ had no chance, LOL. (edit: And there was Skype too.) The last time I opened it under Pidgin on Ubuntu in 2010-2011.