International dating

A few years back it became very hip to give out your email address
instead of your phone number. These days even the humble email
address has almost given way to the swapping of ICQ numbers.
No Internet dating book would be complete without discussing
ICQ, and with over 100,000,000 users word wide it’s no wonder.
I’ll say up front that if you don’t have ICQ then do yourself and
your chances a real favour and surf on over to www.icq.com and
get it for yourself.

What is ICQ?
ICQ is a separate program that runs in the background on your
computer, and allows you to keep in contact instantly with other
people using ICQ. You can send files, messages, chat in real time,
talk, and even send SMS messages to and from mobiles. ICQ will
alert you when people come ‘online’, and you can send messages
and files, etc., even when people are off-line, much like email.
In addition, to this it allows you to search for other ICQ users
with similar interests, etc., which is a great untapped resource for
the smart Internet dater. We will talk about this in a later chapter.

Your ICQ number
When you join ICQ you will be given a unique number (also called a
Universal Internet Number – UIN) that will stay with you forever.
This number is generated sequentially starting from 1 upwards.
At the time of writing, this number is over a staggering 100,000,000
This is the number that you swap with other people. With it
they can find you and add you to their ‘ICQ list’.

ICQ snobbery
Believe it or not, there are people on ICQ that look down on people
with bigger ICQ numbers than themselves. Some will even refuse
to speak to people with an ICQ number bigger than a certain
number. It’s not unusual either to find people trying to sell their
low ICQ numbers to make money. As a guide, if you have a sub
1,000,000 number you are pretty hot stuff and obviously a seasoned
Internet veteran. It’s rare to meet people like that these days though.
There are whole books devoted to ICQ and its use, but the details
on their web site are enough to get you up and running.

By David L. Jone