Interesting. ICQ's death started the day AOL bought it. I actually still use the thing (and have for a while as one of my UIN's is 10556) - but almost all the people I used to talk to on it have moved to googletalk, msn, yahoo, or even skype. AOL kind of dropped the ball on this one if you ask me - they should of gotten into VOIP with it and really worked on video chat. At one time you even used to be able to run your own ICQ 'groups' - and I created a VFP group that at one point had 300+ memebers that I had carefully screened - but eventually AOL shut those down. I still log into a couple of my ICQ #'s every day as I use Trillian for my chat-client - but like I said - almost no one uses it anymore.
Perhaps if someone else buys it they will give it some fresh features. The other issue that hampered ICQ was the spam situation - I still get a few of those too....

>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703442904574594390157672818.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLTopStories
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>ICQ still better than msn but noone left at ICQ. I quit ICQ after just left Vladimir and Martina in my list.
>I hate that in MSN; I wrote, wrote ... after a few minutes later: these messages couldn't send... It was never never happened at ICQ...