ICQ has always been a chat system that allows you to find people of similar interests.  By entering in the littlest of data, you can find people who like the same music, movies, or random interests as you do. Then, having found these users, you can pester the hell out of them. Being one who doesn't feel like talking to people at random online, I find myself at the other side of the pestering stick. From time to time, people who like <insert generic thing here> have tried talking to me, and it's ranged from almost interesting to annoying. No harm done, I suppose. Usually they see that I'm not that interesting to talk to and am rarely online with ICQ, so I never see them again. However, I loaded up ICQ lately and noticed TONS of people trying to talk to me about interesting things... or so they say.

Fair enough, it's a girl. I'm sure the next thing she'll be asking me is if I'm single, proving once again that the Internet is just a series of connected networks, giving users the ability to turn it into one big intergalatic pick-up bar.

Great. Internet friends. I'm sure they can even be a penpal and talk about current pressing world news, like Mariah getting dropped from her record label.

Excellent that I'm not single? Hmm. Tip off #1?

...but we were just getting to know each other!

Nothing wrong with that, right? Just looks like your average chat with someone... I've had random people talk to me before, and my usual response run anywhere from "oh" to "uh huh". So, at first I thought this was some random person talking to me, and I naturally didn't care. I continued to fill in an reply box with "hi", "no", "oh", and "bye", respectively. Then I promptly added the user to the ignore list, figuring it was some spacey girl on the other end of the line who i had really no interest in talking to.

...until I got this message.

Look familar? I thought so. Realizing that these weren't people trying to waste my time, but rather machines, I responsed in the best natural manner.

Which of course brought the automated response of:

...and so forth.

So, now not only do I get random links through ICQ from random people, and tons of trash mail in my email box, I get people that are really just bots that pretend to be people trying to convince me to go to such and such site. Bah.

Of course, it's easy to spot the bots on ICQ, and I'm sure I could block users that aren't in my ICQ list from sending me messages, but... meah. Just one more annoyance I have to deal with to have constant access to worthless data.
 

ICQ is copyright and registered to AOL.