All,
I was just thinking of this today when I saw that ICQ has an absurd number of registered accounts (122,681,789). I remember many years ago (1996?) when one of my friends was frustrated by the fact that he couldn't easily send me a quick message while we were both on the Internet. He said, "isn't there a program out there that will let me know if you're online & then let me send you a short message?" I figured that there had to be, so I searched and found ICQ... the rest is history.
Now, obviously that 122,681,789 number is skewed by the fact that many of those accounts are no longer in use, but the fact remains that ICQ has just assigned userIDs by an incremental value since day one. Also, from playing a bit with their directory, it appears that they started the numbers at 10,000. Well, my ICQ number is 152,833. That puts me in the first tenth of a percent of users! Anyone out there have a lower number than that?
BTW: you can search for a user by ICQ# at this link. This can be crudely useful in validating any claims like "My number is 25!"
A little fun for a boring Saturday!
-Ryan
I was just thinking of this today when I saw that ICQ has an absurd number of registered accounts (122,681,789). I remember many years ago (1996?) when one of my friends was frustrated by the fact that he couldn't easily send me a quick message while we were both on the Internet. He said, "isn't there a program out there that will let me know if you're online & then let me send you a short message?" I figured that there had to be, so I searched and found ICQ... the rest is history.
Now, obviously that 122,681,789 number is skewed by the fact that many of those accounts are no longer in use, but the fact remains that ICQ has just assigned userIDs by an incremental value since day one. Also, from playing a bit with their directory, it appears that they started the numbers at 10,000. Well, my ICQ number is 152,833. That puts me in the first tenth of a percent of users! Anyone out there have a lower number than that?
BTW: you can search for a user by ICQ# at this link. This can be crudely useful in validating any claims like "My number is 25!"
A little fun for a boring Saturday!
-Ryan
Looks like one guy was lower on the other thread.
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