ICQ vs. MSN vs. whatever else

Okay, it's time for another rant... there's not much better to do. And if for some reason you don't know where I stand already, I'm PRO-ICQ. Yeah, skip this if you don't really care, it just needs to be said.

Where to start... hmm... well, let's see, offline messages. Why can you not send offline messages with MSN? Is it because it SUCKS? I certainly think so. Yes, you could get MSN-plus or whatever it's called, but apparently you 'have' to pay for it. Right, like anyone would really do that. And no, I'm not going to spend 5 seconds to find it on kazaa or something. That's 5 seconds that could be spent on ICQ! The other thing people always bring to my attention when I'm beating up on MSN is the fact that it's more 'convenient' to just hit enter and not ctrl+enter to send a message. Let me break this argument into a couple of parts. First of all, this is supposed to be an instant messenger, not an instant chatroom. With icq, you send messages with multiple lines like a good IM should. With MSN, you're basically just opening a chat room with someone. Oh, and btw, ICQ also has chat functions anyway, so don't try to bring that up. Which brings me to the other part of the argument. One of my biggest pet peeves is the fact that if you talk on MSN, people tend to send multiple messages at a time (where as with icq, you can send the multiple-line message all at once). Not only is this grossly annoying if you have sounds on, but you might start replying to the first line, only to realize that there's more to the message. Then the conversation gets broken, there's confusion and general mass hysteria. No one likes that.

Another big beef is the contact list. With icq you can change the names of the people on your list to whatever you want, whereas MSN only displays what that user wants. Good for MSN in a way, yes, since it preserves whatever you want people to see, but much worse since many times the names are so frickin' long that you have to move your mouse over it to see what people are trying to say. Plus, with icq you have that pop-up window when you're in away, n/a, etc. that can also be personalized. So no points lost there. And what might be the best feature of icq, the fact that you can justify the contact list to one side of the screen so it doesn't interfere with the rest of your apps. MSN? Nope.. you have to set it to always on top, and manually reform your windows if you want it to not interfere with anything else. History! MSN history is pathetic. It's XML based and limited in size, enough said. With icq I have history that dates back to 1998 all in the same file.

There's other small stuff too, like group mode, contact list sorting, etc. But I'm sure you get the picture. The selling points of MSN though... the picture. Oh the picture. Where would MSN be without the picture? Too bad it's tiny and you have to resize certain pictures to display them there anyway. Other than that there's not much else. Oh, and fyi, yes, I do have MSN, just because there're people who refused to be enlightened to the level of icq. Microsoft really knows how to monopolize....