YouthPastor2000

"Would you like to know if your students & friends are surfing the net? Right now? No longer will you search in vain for students & friends on the net.

ICQ does the searching for you, alerting you in real time when friends & colleagues sign on. You can chat, send messages and files, play games or use it as the perfect business tool to find and contact associates in realtime through the internet."

ICQ is all that and more. I wish I could describe the amount of success I've had with it. It would be terrific if every computer had ICQ automatically installed and configured on it. I use it everyday to:

• know when my friends come online,
• help troubleshoot a computer in England,
• provide friends with instant URLs to great online resources,
• send files to a friend (faster than he's ever received anything over the internet before),
• Multi-person chat session, and
• Ask quick questions without having to place phone calls.

I recommend it over other real-time communication products because:

• It's FREE and a high-quality product! (This should be reason enough.)
• Minimal memory requirement and doesn't attempt to rewrite system files causing possible incompatibility with other applications (like various FREE Microsoft products I've tested).
• You can be online either privately and publicly (only those I authorize are notified when I'm online),
• I can go on invisibly or set it up to ignore all incoming requests,
• It has a "do not disturb" message so other can know I'm on and really busy, and
• It's not an overly social program...
• I used to get so many people contacting me with PowWow. I never personally knew any of them either. They'd all want to use the microphone feature... which is cool, but it was a major pain because I'd have the speaker volume turned off while working or usually I couldn't understand their language or accent.

ICQ doesn't have any voice features because there are currently enough competitors out there trying design and market better real-time voice packages. You can easily configure it to automatically work with NetMeeting, InternetPhone, VDOPhone, CoolTalk, CU-SeeMe, and more!

James has been using real-time communications programs after he discovered that all his friends' phone lines were busy because of online activity.