Hacker News Reader

Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

Is this a leak or a release?

Anyway, it seems like 5-10 years too late. I remember when I was in school (till 2003) that ICQ was huge. People knew their ICQ numbers by heart, and it was as important as e.g. WhatsApp or Facebook is today. It even anticipated microblogging - you could set a custom "status message", and people would check each others messages to see what others were doing. They had a lot of features that were not to different from what Facebook has today - you had Flash based minigames, a personal homepage-like area etc.. And of course they had a huge network advantage. I really wonder how they dropped the ball...

View on HN

> I really wonder how they dropped the ball.

In my country, ICQ died when Microsoft started shipping MSN Messenger with Windows and worked hard to make people aware of it. (Microsoft even did a silly marketing campaign for MSN that involved a guy dressed as a butterfly). People used the Messenger that was already installed in their OS, and ICQ was history.

I believe the same thing happened in most other countries, because it only took a couple of years for all the foreign ICQ buddies I had to move off to MSN.

I seem to have a different experience. Everyone migrated to Yahoo or AIM with MSN a distant third. In my social circle, yahoo was the king of chat for a very long time.

We moved to Skype because of the end-to-end encryption, the group chats feature, the ability to talk and the network effect from others using it and us not wanting to use two clients at once. Oh, and with Skype file transfers would just work, while no ICQ client would ever let me initiate a file transfer to another person, or if it did, it would go though servers on the other end of the world.

Parent might be in Europe and you in the US. Back in those days that's how the IM market shares were roughly distributed among my peers.

Yep. I'm in Brazil and the friends I mentioned are in Europe.

Well, ICQ was very popular up to 2005-2010. MSN was never a popular choice (in fact it was not popular at all).

So people usually used ICQ, Skype and Jabber. Gmail+GTalk done the job killing ICQ for most here.

MSN was the dominant messenger in pretty much the whole world apart from the US where Yahoo was dominant.

In 2006 ComScore rated MSN having 61% of the world market and 90% in South America. Interestingly, Europe had far more messenger users than the US too. (all from here: http://betanews.com/2006/04/11/msn-messenger-most-used-im-cl...)

From what I remember ICQ was always fairly nerdy and once everyone's non-nerd friends started showing up on AIM they had to make the switch.

One thing I miss from ICQ was the ability to have messages stored on the server and delivered next time your friend logged in. None of the popular messaging apps today do that.

I also remember that ICQ made a huge mess of their webpage back in the dawn of the dotcom era.

> One thing I miss from ICQ was the ability to have messages stored on the server and delivered next time your friend logged in. None of the popular messaging apps today do that.

Eh? Firstly, people are never offline these days. Secondly, Facebook Messenger (and SMS and Email).

> One thing I miss from ICQ was the ability to have messages stored on the server and delivered next time your friend logged in. None of the popular messaging apps today do that.

You mean aside Skype, Facebook messenger, Slack and Whatsapp? And those are just the 4 services I currently (and reluctantly) use. So there's going to be others I've not mentioned.

Weird, FBM gives me the "user is not available" message when they're not online.

Skype for business (AKA Lync) absolutely does not store messages, although I've not used the consumer version.

> Weird, FBM gives me the "user is not available" message when they're not online.

I used it all the time to send messages to my wife when she's not online; knowing she'll pick it up when she's available. In fact we tend to use it like e-mail in that regard.

> Skype for business (AKA Lync) absolutely does not store messages, although I've not used the consumer version.

Well not storing messages is one of the sales points of Skype for Business; if I recall correctly. Or at the very least encryption for confidentiality (which I know doesn't mean messages can't be stored). But in any case, the regular consumer version of Skype does store messages like I'd suggested. And like with FB Messenger, it's a feature of Skype I use frequently.

> I really wonder how they dropped the ball...

Failing to give people usernames.

> People knew their ICQ numbers by heart

Some did, but the fact that you emphasise that as something remarkable is a hint here. I specifically remember the numbers as being a significant source of friction when connecting to new people. For contrast, I still easily remember what my username on MSN Messenger was when I started using that in around 2000 -- because it was my email address.

>> I really wonder how they dropped the ball...

>Failing to give people usernames.

If this is really the case then we can expect skype to die soon. I remember some time ago you were able to add contacts using skype logins, recently I was trying to do that on my friends Windows machine and failed. I simply wasn't able to add myself to his friendlist. I found somewhere on MS forum information that if you need that kind of functionality you should instead provide more information about you so you'd be easier to find...

I seem to recall ICQ's popularity already being in free-fall by 2000. My guess would be that as former AOL users switched to local ISPs, they would download the familiar AIM instead of ICQ. Most of my ICQ friends were internet friends; everyone at school used AIM.

EDIT: according to Wikipedia, ICQ peaked in 2001.

At some point ICQ made some really bad development decisions and people avoided the new versions like the plague.

I can't remember which version in particular was in demand, but I do remember lots of sites specifically serving up the installers of the old versions.

I can still remember the "uh-oh" sound. I remember searching for and download sound boards to replace the sounds. They also had that chat window where you could actually the user typing. Nostalgia eh.

I fell asleep with ICQ running and my speakers turned way up once. 3 AM and someone decided to send me a message. That was like 15 years ago, I still freeze up a little when I hear it.

I had something similar just after I moved out of home for the first time. ICQ running, speakers still on from the music I'd been playing before, late at night. Someone logged on. Huge loud KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK sound. Just about gave myself a coronary!

In my late-90s undergrad dorm, this happened all the time. Somebody down the hall would have the system cranked, hooked up to the computer. 3am, he gets an ICQ message. A thundrous UH-OH wakes half the hall.

The cash register at my favourite health food store uses the "uh-oh" sound. To this day it remains one of the most annoying sounds I've ever heard, and it will not leave my life.

I used to work in one game company and one of my team mate had parrot that he was bringing to our offices. This parrot like to annoy certain people with uh-oh sound, which always cause automatic reaction of checking the the ICQ client and angry swears to the parrot.

I'm not 100% certain about this, but I always felt like they stole that sound from the game Worms.

I believe it was from Chip's Challenge.

The Worms sound is slightly lower and has a slightly longer "oh", imo.[0][1] I don't remember there being an "uh oh" sound in Chip's Challenge (the death sound was "bummer" iirc)[2]

0: https://youtu.be/6iCPIUGnHQ8

1: https://youtu.be/eQwJaDyzet8?t=2m54s (apologies for the video track, couldn't find anything better)

2: https://youtu.be/N32ZTPtD9AM

Nowadays I hear that exact sound… at McDonald's. In Russia, they use this sound at their kitchens to signal that something's ready. Or something. You can hear it when you're ordering.

I have it set as the notification sound for a friend with whom I exchange text messages very frequently. After we graduated from high school in 1999 we communicated with ICQ almost exclusively for the first couple of years until we switched to MSN Messenger, so it constitutes a form of vestigial nostalgia.

I'm surprised to read of people hating it so much.

Desktop software always had a friction that the web didn't.

Desktop software was fine, until you were in an internet cafe, at a friend's house, or most importantly, at work, where computers were locked down.

You couldn't use msn messenger at work, you could use facebook because it was just a web page.

There were plenty of web-based MSN Messenger clients.

But you needed to know about them ahead of time, or search for and pick one on the spot, and rely on it to be stable/reliable (and actively supported or it would fail next time the protocol was tweaked as seemed to happen often if the release cycle of MSN plugins for pidgin were representative), and trust an extra 3rd party with your conversations.

Just using an IM arrangement that natively supports web based access, which it has some disadvantages, was much simpler for most people.

Which at the time were garbage because of the limitations with browser support. Back in the 90s and even early 2000s, the most reliable way to do HTML chat services was via frames refreshing. Which is why many chat services ran as Java applets or (later on) as Flash.

Thankfully we now have a whole array of better technologies available and wider support for them. So we're not as reliant on browser plugins nor native clients (though frankly I still prefer native clients).

Although to be fair, there was ICQ2GO (go.icq.com), and a bit later meebo. Both worked fine on the road, at internet cafes, or at school.

Also eBuddy. I remember IM-ing late into the night with that and terrible web browsers on the PSP and DS.

Probably the same way Yahoo did it, who also had those features and now is close to the dumpster.

Lack of focus, I guess?

Looks like a leak, because the source code is no longer available.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com