I've spent the past few days trying to locate and get in touch with a variety of people: roommates from college, friends from high school, and a few from even further back. Google's been invaluable in this respect, of course, and it's good to stretch my information mining muscles. But you know what's been even more useful? ICQ.
Anyone younger than me is probably literally too young to remember it, but it was the ur-IM, predating AIM, Yahoo, and MSN. And it was way ahead of them in a lot of functionality, notably and handily, the auto-archiving of all messages. Very few people I know use it today, but it was and is very popular in Europe, and with a slightly older generation of Net users.
So I've been perusing through my hundreds of old contacts, looking for email addresses, scribbled notes, clues in message logs, and the like. Already found one roommate, now working at a hotel... in Beijing. (If you're reading this, hola, jefe.) Another search has taken me through the organizational remnants of the Howard Dean campaign. Not to mention the National Forestry Service, the english department at the University of Chicago, and a food company in Tulsa, OK.
It's been a lot of fun, actually. I'm tempted to say I need to lose people more often, just so I can have the pleasure of finding them again.
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3 comments:
I don't know if you knew or not, but you can add ICQ numbers to AIM buddy lists as of quite some time ago. I'm sure I'll find that handy someday.
Hey, I remember ICQ and used it for quite a few years, it was how Troy and I kept in touch constantly when we were just getting started writing. Yay 28.8 dialup!
ALso yay for the "Uh-oh" sound whenever you got a message.
Ah the things that leaving comments on blogs will lead to. Thanks for inspiring a little bit of Internet Archeaology of my own (though you made this one pretty easy). Hope all is well with you.
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