Editor's reviews

Program reviewed: Mirabilis ICQ

NEVER again the hassle of finding out if a friend is on the 'Net

ICQ is an application designed to meet your friends, colleagues, relatives, or anybody you want, on the Internet, without any extra work from your part.

It works the following way: when you register, you enter a nickname, email address, and (if you want) additional info. A UIN (Universal Identification Number) much like a pager number is assigned to you.

You create a contact list with all the people you want to be notified if they are online. With the search tool it's easy to locate people by names, email addresses or UINs.

As soon as you get on the Internet, ICQ will contact a server and tell you who of your contact list is online. As well, other people that have you on their contact list will be notified of your presence.

For security, it's you who assigns permissions to locate you only to the ones you want.

Features:

  • It allows you to message anyone, even if the user is not online. If this is the case, the ICQ server will store your message and send it as soon as the receiver logs in the next time.
  • But it does better than that: it comes with a full-blown Chat module, that works between multiple people (infinite number of partners) and is point-to-point, meaning that the data is sent directly to the participating computers, not through any server, therefore these are secure connections and can't be logged. You can add users by dragging them from your Contact list to the Chat window.
  • You can send files to whoever is online (very fast data transfer rates!) and URLs, which can be automatically added to your Favorites or Bookmark list.
  • And you can tell the server to send the entire ICQ program to a friend directly to his mailbox, so that he/she/it (?) won't need to download it from Mirabilis' site (Attention spammers: STOP spamming or you could get 25 megabytes of ICQ's from angry people :-) )

Download it right now! It's still in beta, and that makes it totally FREE!!! Users can be paged to ICQ with the WWPager, a special web page designed specially for your ICQ number, so users without ICQ can send you messages too!