I just cleaned up my instant messenger list. This was a strange experience.
Mostly I pruned multiple service accounts for people I only talk to in one place. A surprising number of my friends had three or four old IM names from their pasts, some of them five years gone.
A few of the nicknames had been used once because of one incident: a temporary breakup, avoidance of one person or another, a joke. Some were from friends’ previous jobs.
Two of them were dead. The collision of instant messenging and death was unexpected.
None of them were people I don’t or shouldn’t or won’t talk to any more, which was a relief.
And then I left a few in because I could not remember what they meant. Accidents? One-time work contacts? A stealth name of someone I forget? Keep it in there, I guess.
Be My Blog 
I still track you in ICQ. That’s like the morse code of instant messengers. When the bombs hit ICQ will still work.
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You mean I’m not the only person that still uses this??? I thought my lonely little ICQ number was sitting out in space…with nobody to talk to…
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You. me and 300 porn spammers.
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YESH!
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I need to clean up my IM friends list, too. I have names from 1997 when people all over the world were using ICQ. I had friends all over the world and still keep in touch with a few of them.
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I think I perform a similar task about every 2.75 years, the interval in which I seem to buy another laptop.
It would be nice if the services that support the various IM accounts would publish basic statistics… maybe something that would mark all accounts that have not been used within the past two years of something.
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Trillian does this, kind of…If you have someone on your list that hasn’t logged in in a really long time, the colored dot (that identifies which messenger system a contact belongs to) turns into a colored donut.
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