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Flat ICQ
or, "The version I'm cool with" | |
Is anybody else sick to death with ICQbloat? Feeping creaturism at it's finest, ICQ was once a fine little net-based messenger, but now it's grown into a mangy mongrel of uselessness. The problem is, lots of people have an ICQ id, and that string of random numbers is something of a de facto standard
for locating/communicating with people on the net.
I propose that mirabilis make a new, stripped down version of ICQ - no file transfer, no UDP ports, no security, no voice chat, no birthday reminders, no active lists, no bs. Just plain ol' plaintext from A to B on the net, and none of the recognizability of <mockingly> Consumer-Friendly-Big-Corp-Crap(tm)</mock>.
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Agreed. Too many folks trying to follow MicroSoft down the intuitive innovation road. Less is more, particulary in utilityware. |
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Miraballis has forgetten the age old answer to programming! The KISS method. They have so much stuff in ICQ now that I dont know what 3/4 of all the crap does, nor do I want to know. Its all useless eye candy. All I use it for is to message back and forth to friends. Do I need a search engine on it? Do I need 50 buttons linking to other crap I dont use...Nope... |
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The ICQ protocol has been fairly extensively hacked and is available for download on the net if you look hard enough, so I'd imagine that anyone with the inclination and a bit of programming know-how could write a bloat free client - There are many 'unofficial' versions available for Linux, their main purpose being to provide a more usable non Windows client than Mirabillis' pathetic Java attempt, but most of them also do away with the crap in the process. |
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If you're going to mock an "American-Big-Corp", you would do well to pick one which is American. |
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Mirabilis is headquarted in Israel, doofus. |
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Now, they were acquired by AOL some time ago, but the feature creep you speak of existed well before the acquisition. (AOL's own instant messenger, AIM, is lean and simple by comparison.) |
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*is shamed*; *takes a lesson*; *edits his idea* |
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Actually, what I've thought would be cool would be a telnet "server" which would open up a chat window; then two people could chat simply by having one telnet to the other. |
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There are many such telnet chat servers. I'm going to pull a PeterSealy on this one, though, unless you're seriously interested and can't find one. |
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Peter - you know it's getting bad when your nick develops etymology. |
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All you have to do to find a telnet 'chat' thing is search for MUD, MUCK, MOO, etc... |
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I run EveryBuddy on my FreeBSD box. I love it. It is a stripped down chat program that has support for ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, AIM, and Jabber. I imagine that it will get more bloated as time passes, but for now it does exactly what I want it to and nothing else. |
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[I propose that mirabilis make a new, stripped down version of ICQ - no file transfer, no UDP ports, no security, no voice chat, no birthday reminders, no active lists, no bs. Just plain ol' plaintext from A to B on the net] |
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there is one, of sorts, its called mIRC :). pure text and a few colours, it rules. |
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Baked! It's called Miranda and can be found at http://miranda-icq.sourceforge.net/
It really is the answer. |
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egnor: Are all of the telnet chat servers out there things that run remotely? I'm thinking of having it built into something like Hyperterminal (you open up a copy of Hyperterminal, tell it to "connect" as an open telnet socket, and then anyone with a telnet client can chat with you directly and do anything else normally allowed in Hyperterminal (log to disk, upload/download, etc.) |
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