IDA765 - Project Outline
by Alexande Wieder

Network:

ICQ ("i seek you") is one of the largest and most popular Instant Messanger in the world.
According to www.icq.com there are 190 million registered users and more than 8 million users login every day.
Once you have downloaded the ICQ-software, you can add other users to your buddylist (sometimes you´ll need a authorization)
and then you can talk to them, also using a webcam, share files and actually more and more features like games are added.
A node will be a user and a link is between 2 users that have each other in their buddylist.


Data

To collect the data for my project I will send a survey to all people in my buddylist and request them to send it
to the people in their list. In the survey I´ll ask how many people they have in their list, where the users in their list are from,
the purpose of using ICQ and some more facts.


Goal

With the collected data I hope to find an informative basis for the degree of seperation in the ICQ-Network and the generel usage of it.


Motivation

I use ICQ now for nearly 7 years and with this new learned knowledge in this course and new approach about networks
it´s interesting for me to look at this network from a new point of view.


Problems

I think there are a couple of accounts at the network that are no longer in use and the number of members will be
lower than the 190 million registered accounts. Also in my buddylist could be some user that no longer use ICQ
or who are only rarely online, so it could be difficult to get enough data.