ICQ Statistics
My message database file for ICQ is 60 megs. I got curious. I wanted to know just how much I used ICQ in the last 18 months. How the hell did the message history grow to 60 megs? So, I saved the entire message dialog archive to text file (which took a good 15 minutes in itself), and opened it up in Word. As a result of the 120,000 icq messages exchanged over the last year and a half:
Almost 2 million words?!
That’s an average of 15 words a message and over 200 messages a day (assuming I get on ICQ every day, which I don’t, so the message/day count is likely to be higher). That’s very scary. I’d expect that ICQ forms a greater part of our daily communications than one may think. Now, multiply this by the number of people using ICQ in a day, and I wonder how many messages fly around the world? Add e-mail, other IM programs, newsgroups and real-time chats to this and … yikes. Incidentally, I think there was an estimate, that if every word man had spoken since we could speak was shoved into a text file, it would be 5 to 6 exabytes (EB) big. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes.
9:45pm (GMT +10.00) 
