ICQ will stop working from June 26
icq.com
icq.com
The sounds it made. The moving image when it was connecting. Listening in Winamp to one of only a few dozen possible songs that I had carefully downloaded.
Being able to randomly connect to people you would filter. Yes, I want to talk to someone more or less my age but in Iceland. Or any other country.
But most of all, the feeling of being connected. As a teenager in the autism spectrum, that was one of the best feelings I had at that time.
Most people don’t get it when I say this, maybe someone here will, but to me it all started going downhill when people all of a sudden switched to a worse alternative, MSN. I see a direct line from there to the annoying easy-to-accept-while-hard-to-reject-but-always-there-anyway cookie pop-ups.
And no, this is isn’t some form of Ostalgie where we long for past days of hardship with tender feelings. ICQ just had a great user experience as far as I am concerned and to this day I prefer it to existing alternatives from WhatsApp to Webex chat (don’t mention Teams please, I’m having a poetic moment). It was rather a feeling that perhaps other Brazilians will share: a longing, saudade, for the simpler (yes) but better and more poetic 90s, when ICQ connected you to a world that watched Brazil win the fourth World Cup, Ayrton Senna was inspiring generations to be healthier and their better selves and Mamonas Assassinas could only make us laugh, not cry…
So long, ICQ. You will always be part of why I love the internet.
PS: I realize the timing of those events doesn’t necessarily align. But sentimentally they do.
Second thought: how do people randomly connect to talk now? Comments sections mostly? I have long ago stopped seeking new connections of any variety.
I don't think anybody actually cares, but I resent discord for this terminology.
I believe the origin, however, was to help it clearly and directly compete with teamspeak or mumble at the time it launched. You would actually have to invest in some sort of hosted server for your group, so the name made sense as a way to help people visualize how discord worked. It’s definitely a relic at this point though.
“a computer or computer program which manages access to a centralized resource or service in a network”
Seems like it could apply to a discord group. The centralized resource being chat data.
I don't think IRC is one of those technologies whose usage count in absolute terms is at an all-time high today. It wasn't exactly mainstream in the early 2000s, but it still had lots of users.
“Here you see the 100 largest and most popular IRC networks that take part in netsplit.de's comparison, but please consider that there are still some big IRC networks that are out of competition"
Just getting online used to place you in a small enough pool that making connections was easy -- the fact that you were online in the first place gave you something in common.
Any single online platform has far too many users (and spammers, bots, trolls, grifters, etc.) to make it a good place to meet friends.
Maybe IRC would be a good idea.
https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/28/aol-sells-instant-messagin...
Edit: I looked it up, maybe not Australia...
Hmm. China? No -- WeChat. Japan? No -- Line. Korea? No -- KaoKao.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/whatsapp-...
I'd pre pandemic FB Messenger was definitely more popular but there's been a gradual but noticible shift to WhatsApp since.
It’s also why, briefly, (2008-2010 ish I believe) blackberry phones were the ones kids wanted because they could use blackberry messaging for free without using up their sms credits.
I have exactly one contact who prefers iMessage over WhatsApp or Signal. The majority use WhatsApp, with Signal being a growing second.
Telegram comes in third place - but mostly that’s used for following “feeds”
The longing for Ostalgie was based on things being easier and basic needs met more easily than in the cut throat "free market" environment that followed
(I seem to recall MSN having some killer feature or another that made people switch. Or just critical Maas, with Windows.)
> If you want to chat with people, you have to go where they are, and ICQ and AOL have the most people by far. Chances are, your friends are using one of those services, not one of the smaller ones like MSN Instant Messenger. With all of Microsoft’s muscle, money, and marketing skill, they are just not going to be able to break into auctions or instant messaging, because the network effects there are so strong.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-...
To this day, my text notifications ring "hey ho"
ICQ. Geocities (and even some of its clones). I even have fond memories of early yahoo chat such as it was.
The open Internet and the quirky services that made it up was a miraculous, wonderful thing back then. It’s heartbreaking to think of what it’s become since.
I sometimes wonder if there’s a way back to an Internet that resembles the one we had, but all people seem to care about now are celebrities on InstaTikTokTube.
In terms of what you said about ICQ and the sounds (totally agree btw), I used DarkSky for years before it got axed and I miss its rain warning sound horribly.
After companies started dominating the internet, it was never be the same. We thought that any company would play by our rules, but they poisoned us with their research, gamification, single way information flow, and walled gardens.
This is why I moved to small web.
I miss the old internet dearly.
Nicely coined.
Another related term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IndieWeb
see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) (NOT web, but similar in spirit - an extended "Gopher"-like protocol)
It was proprietary client software released in 1996 and bought by AOL two years later.
It relies on a service operated by a single party, which is now sunsetting it.
According to the Wikipedia article, when ICQ was under AOL's stewardship, "AOL pursued an aggressive policy regarding alternative ("unauthorized") ICQ clients."
The article details all the tactics that AOL implemented in the service to break unofficial clients.
I don't see where the word "democratic" connects with ICQ.
Pidgin, Miranda, Adium are the things I was referring to - would be cool if I could use them for whatsapp, signal, gmail chat/hangouts but I don‘ think thats possible. Happy to get corrected here.
The present-day, mainstream, proprietary chat systems are open to anyone to join and chat with anyone.
Most of whatever restrictions they have are necessitated by spam. Allowing new members to immediately post unlimited amounts of material into any chat room or any other member's inbox is a bad idea, even in an open-source, federated chat system.
That's IRC.
IRC is the other one, not the only one. However, Discord is eating its lunch in these days, sadly.
Guess what? Most of them are abandoned and have similar bugs that are entirely down to some shit being completely undocumented :)
I strongly agree.
I think there are a few steps the community could take.
• Promote awareness of this, put it in licence agreements or contributor guidelines.
• Document how to find and how to use FOSS comms tools.
• Pidgin is the best we have for now. It needs an update, so the package includes as many protocol connectors as possible as standard, together with docs how to enable and use them. Getting away from crappy web apps embedded in Electron is pretty important, especially for bringing xBSD and so on on board.
• A corresponding update for Adium would be good, too.
A few years ago I worked for a major Linux vendor and I had Pidgin talking to IRC, Rocket.chat, Slack, Telegram, Skype, Google $CHAT_NAME_OF_THE_MONTH, and all my other services... but it took considerable manual effort.
The result was working multiprotocol chat in about 10% of the RAM usage of the Franz Electron client.
On Pidgin? Cool. I am surprised but I managed to get Pidgin working on macOS via Brew yesterday, which automatically installed a recent version of WINE, to my considerable surprise.
It wouldn't connect to anything and I couldn't find where, in one OS's emulated filesystem on top of my real OS's rather complex filesystem, I could put plugins, but hey, it started and ran and that's quite impressive.
Given that Gtk apps such as Geany manage to run on macOS, I thought a native Unix port of Pidgin would be an easier effort than the Windows one, but hey.
But. I think it's fair to say it felt more free, it had a high barrier of technical entry, which filtered out most of the public, and there was no craven race to monetize and enshitify absolutely every single of our interactions.
Mostly because corporations were in the process of figuring out how to do all that with this new Internet thing.
after ICQ, from what I remember AOL Messenger was the dominant force in the US, MSN was very popular in many countries, but across Asia, Middle East, and many Eastern European countries, Yahoo Messenger was the de facto standard.
Not dissimilar to the situation we have today with WhatsApp and WeChat and iMessage. Except back then you could use pidgin or trillian as multi protocol clients which solved the issue. Somehow, we have regressed so much in this area in the last 20 years.
I personnally didn't even knew there was a Yahoo issued Messenger until this comment.
I get it, and wholly agree.
MSN wasn't a worse alternative to ICQ, MSN was faster and came with Windows, making it both easier to keep running at the background on the weak hardware of the time (i remember launching ICQ and waiting waiting waiting at the splash screen with the rotating petal colors and then the main UI was a mess of buttons, icons and all sorts of bloat) and it was just easier to get into.
ICQ did release ICQ Lite which was lighter but by then that was too late - and even that couldn't combat MSN coming bundled with Windows, meaning that people who didn't have any IM suddenly now had one.
There were also cool places to hang out like Yahoo Games or a few of the location based chat apps that were fun to connect to strangers and just chat.
Discord is so walled garden it's awful in this respect.
I also miss the VRML world builders like CyberTown https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown
I greatly enjoyed how with XMPP’s in-band registration you could do things like give each contact a unique XMPP address, only to be used with them. You could have unlimited (well, I never hit a limit) accounts, across a load of servers, proxies per account, unique OTR keys per account, etc.
I don’t think the UI has really been surpassed either, tbh. I really wish someone would do a modern rewrite of Pidgin in some memory safe language.
That said, the vulnerabilities in "libpurple" were way over hyped by someone who rightfully got kicked out of the security community. Most of those vulnerabilities were in fact in protocol implementations that are plug-ins to libpurple and not libpurple itself. I know it's a technicality, but hearing this blatant lie get repeated for over a decade is exhausting.
It wasn't so much the platform that set ICQ apart, it was the time in which it was born into. In the late 90s and early 00s, the internet was still an unchartered 'No Man's Land'. Internet access was difficult and scarce, and people approached it with curiosity and savor. Now the internet is taken for granted, and anonymously connecting to strangers so unremarkable, that it is seen as an excess that can be squandered in mindless and fleeting argument and opposition.
If there was an inflection point, I'd say it was around the nascent rise of Facebook. Connecting to familiars became the default, and also enough, that connecting to strangers didn't hold as much allure as competing to make your life look more appealing within your peer group.
I had a thought last week: When I was in high school (very early Internet years), older people told me the "popular" people will fade away when you go to university. For most part, in my experience, this was true. I realised last week that visual social media allows "high school popular people" (conventionally attractive, for the most part) to stay that way forever. When you look at most social media influencers, there isn't very much special about them, except them seem like the type of person who was popular in high school. For most normies, that is enough to give them more attention than someone else.
At the time of ICQ, chat programs were the sole means of discovering and connecting to people, and allowed people to connect to strangers based on location. I made real life friends, who I met in person on ICQ. I suppose this kind of connection might still happening on game servers and Discord servers, but certainly, it isn't the dominant mode.
As for Facebook being 'visual': Facebook in it's earlier incarnations was just status updates, and mobile phone cameras were still pretty clunky (or non-existant). Instagram took off because it's filters turned otherwise ugly low-fidelity photos into something appealing.
Perhaps you’re thinking of IRC? I don’t recall ICQ having chat rooms. It was purely chat with the ability to discover other users around the world. It was one to one, not many to many, and there was no server bubble to restrict to a particular special interest.
> The early internet strongly self-selected for a Western, upper middle class, college educated person
Maybe middle class, though my family was on the lower end. A lot of the people I talked to on ICQ were from ‘poorer’ countries. Chat wasn’t really demanding on bandwidth
> Around the rise of Facebook came the rise of mobile.
The first smart phones were definitely more expensive than the cheapest PCs, but when they did get affordable in the global south around the early-mid 2010s, ICQ was long dead
> It's just a scale thing.
More and more people are born into a world with ubiquitous internet devoid of cultural scarcity, and I think this has really devalued the way we relate to one another. It’s this lack of cultural scarcity that is one of my points.
‘Social media’ was also a change in mode from relating to strangers to connecting to people we already know. But I don’t ascribe causation to Facebook specifically, it was just with enough time and enough scale (as you mention) that ‘social media’ was inevitable. Prior to Facebook I’d used services like MySpace, Bebo, and Quickdot, that have all since faded from view. We were searching for what Facebook came to be – a low effort way to share our experience with people we already know
My wires crossed a bit with AIM chat which I used around the same time. I only got on IRC later because I was too young to be interested in the things folks talked about on IRC at that age.
> Maybe middle class, though my family was on the lower end.
Basically someone with the ability to pay for Internet and pay for the phone time. Obviously the class lines weren't exact and depending on where in the era (e.g. 1996 it was expensive, 2001 it was a lot more affordable) prices differed but it was definitely not something people in the hood or from Asian countries outside Japan and Taiwan could justify spending money on.
> More and more people are born into a world with ubiquitous internet devoid of cultural scarcity, and I think this has really devalued the way we relate to one another. It’s this lack of cultural scarcity that is one of my points.
100%. I wonder if something similar happened around the start of the telephone and telegraph when the ability to contact anyone "anywhere" in the wealthy world became a lot easier and professional communications stopped being optimistic and instead expected.
Facebook era was late 00s, and didn't hit full stride globally until early 10s. By this point internet access was available to 1 in 4 people. Scale—in meaningful distinction to 'the old web'—had well and truly already arrived. The average Joe and Jane were using the internet.
https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-internet-users
> I wonder if something similar happened around the start of the telephone and telegraph
As Marshall McLuhan famously wrote "The medium is the message". He also coined the term 'information overload' in the 60s when talking about the uptake of radio and television. Ever since the printing press, regular people have been gaining access to information at increasing volume, and not only those of means. However, the particular medium of the internet changed the means of accessing, generating and interacting with information and communicating other people. What McLuhan was pointing out by "The medium is the message" is that every medium has its own flavor, and it's own particular impact on society.
And for the internet it hasn't just been one impact: the rise of email and mailing lists, chat applications, internet-wide keyword search, social media, smartphones and apps, dating apps, AirBnB, Uber.. the fabric of social order is being disrupted again and again by the internet in a manner exceptional to other media. Sometimes it's even hard to see what changes have taken place. To take one example, the rise of dating apps has had a real impact on the profits and kinds of late night venues.
So, to bring back to my earlier point, social media had an impact that changed how we communicate. It was certainly very visible to me at the time. I think in particular with ICQ, it provided a means for strangers to meet and fostered connections outside of our respective bubbles, and for that I remember it fondly, and also worry a bit more about our world as it becomes more fragmented and isolated along social borders.
This reminded me of my Macintosh System 7 days. My CPU was not fast enough to decode MP3s so I convert them to WAVs but my 80MB HDD only had space for about two WAVs at any given time.
I am from Argentina, and share your same feelings.
But I had a low five digit user number, and built a lot of relationships on ICQ (some of which continue today!). It was my main method of electronic communication in college. I had romantic relationships live and die on ICQ.
Another reminder of how things change over time.
Is anyone aware of maintained forks or a revival effort?
Or at least it will die like USENET died: becoming only of interest to spammers and pornographers.
One highlight was being able to connect to it from my phone for the first time; first on my first smartphone (Symbian), then from my "non-smart" Sony Ericsson that succeeded it, via some Java Jabber client and a Jabber-to-ICQ bridge! (Unfortunately nobody else that I knew had it on their phones, so I could only reach people in front of their PCs at home.)
On the other hand, it is and always has been unencrypted (not counting the OTR OTT encryption layer I've been using on it with the few friends that were also on Pidgin or Adium :), didn't support offline messages or even being logged in on more than one client, and was entirely proprietary (not sure if it was part of the "chat wars" [1] too).
Ultimately, the only constant in life is change. Instant messaging is alive and well on other platforms and networks today, let's remember ICQ fondly and be happy that we have so many good alternatives :)
Kind of in that they were a good enough competitor that AOL bought them and AOL definitely continued to fight.
I don't think they ever publicly integrated them but they did merge the back ends enough that for a while you could just login to AIM with an ICQ UID, and impress all your friends with your cool numeric aim account
Before we even had “wi-fi!”
We lived offline and then we connect to the internet for a few minutes, hours, whatever. But you lived your life offline. We attended concerts, took photos, recorded videos, and then we took our time to share them online (maybe that same night, maybe the next days). You went online to discuss something that happened in real life.
Now it's the reverse. We live "online by default". Everything happens online, all we do is first online or at least at the same time. We attend a concert? We publish pictures and videos almost instantly (some people even do a live stream from the concert!). Something happens in politics? People discuss it as it happens on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Going to the computer to connect to surf the web may sound silly, but that was the difference. Internet was inside a device you had to use. Now internet is happening around you all the time (and if you miss it for a few days, ouch!)
Back then, it felt like a parallel world; now it's more like an overlay on this one.
What is your experience of your phone and why are you so passive about it? You're getting unwanted notifications but, then, what, don't uninstall the app? Don't mute the app? Don't click "sign out"?
What gave you the idea that I’m getting unwanted notifications or that I am in some other way helpless about them?
Same for emails, etc. communication felt a lot more “thought out” in a sense - you would have limited time to send or receive information.
Switch to a data plan with less than 2GB of data per month and you'll be a lot more thoughtfull about how much you post instantly. You may still post it but you'll do it when you get home; just like the old days.
The vast majority of my data usage now, on unlimited, comes from watching YouTube.
how times have changed!
1 sec of wav would be 176.4 kB (assuming 44.1 kHz, 16 bits, stereo), or 176.4 * 1024 * 8 bits. That divided by 28800 bits/s (assuming a 28k modem) gives 50.1 seconds.
A 96 kHz 32 bit stereo wav would be 768 kB, 4-5 times that so still less than 5 minutes.
What am I missing?
Simply going to Nintendo.com took a very long time. Lots of us regular users started coming online for the first time and likely overloaded their servers. Navigating to the section of the website where it listed audio files to download was a whole endeavor of itself. It took multiple attempts to download that dang jumping sound. I would leave it running during the day and when I came back later, the download would have randomly timed out. And I think at least once my parents picked up one of phones in the house and messed it up. I believe as a kid I quickly learned that the web was faster at night time when less people were online. So after several failed attempts, I started it at night time and woke up to it completed. Not sure if you were online at that time, but I don't think you can simply reduce this to math equation.
I'm happy to believe the internet was slow and unreliable back them especially from the countryside (actually, I know it for a fact), but assuming a 7 hour night and a 1 second wav file (176.4 * 1000 * 8 = 1411200 bits, I made a mistake in my last comment) would mean 56 bits per second, that's 7 bytes/sec, that would be unusable to browse the web, even by the standards of this past. That's also far from what a 14.4 kbit/s modem is supposed to achieve, even considering that 14.4 kbit/s is a theoretical max and you'd be typically way below this speed in actual use. Hence our surprise.
At this speed, it would have taken you several minutes (and since the internet was unreliable, probably several attempts) to even load nintendo.com and then the download page. The simplest page I know in the wild, perdu.com, is 203 bytes, 909 bytes with the HTTP headers, that would take more than 2 minutes to load at that speed. nintendo.com was likely more complex than that. Given this, you'd have to have some very strong will and patience to go ahead and download a sound for fun as a child (though I can picture this).
I can only assume it didn't take the full night (you woke up on a finished download, it most likely did finish (way) before you were done sleeping), and that there's more to the story that the elements we have. What's still strange to me is that if it took say half an hour, with such a strong determination, would you have gone to sleep instead of excitedly waiting for the download to finish?
I'm not saying your memory is wrong or that you are lying or something like this, I'm sure this recollection is genuine and that it is a strong and fond memory, and I understand that it was long ago so difficult to remember the details, just that we are missing some critical piece to make something complete of your story for ourselves.
And sure, not everything can be reduced to math, but that's our best tool for estimating / evaluating stuff as distant observers.
I don't think I ever stated the download took all night. I said I left the computer connected to the Internet overnight, and it cost $$$ when you pay per hour.
During the day, yes it was taking hours. That does not mean it was downloading at some consistent rate for hours. I would start the download, then it would slow, then stall, and I would leave it and come back later to see it timed out. Rinse and repeat until I tried at night time. For some reason you all are trying to explain why this is impossible using math without considering any other factors (downloads can timeout, IE didn't resume downloads, picking up the phone would disconnect the connection, etc).
Did you all never download those 15-30 part warez versions on Photoshop, 3DS Max, etc. back in the day? I'm talking later, e.g. 28.8 modem days. It would take me several days, and in some cases a week, to download all of those parts. Sure, they were much larger. But the download would stop, timeout, pause for long periods. It wasn't simply a math equation: File size, modem capability = x minutes. I did not work on the infra side of Nintendo.com or any warez site as a pre-teen so I can't comment further on their scalability.
Still, I don't ever remember needing hours to download a tiny wav file (though I mostly looked for MIDI music as that was long songs in a few kb).
You chose the client you used to connect with. Noobs used the official ICQ adware and you used some 1337 open source client on Linux that could handle both ICQ and Jabber. But you could talk to them on the same platform.
Where are the alternative WhatsApp clients? Or iMessage? Or Telegram? You can't talk to anyone anymore unless you submit to one of a few megacorps and run their software.
You get a new flavor of privacy, no moaning about copyright, no nonsensical political correctness, much less need for security, people you can do things with irl and possibly very high bandwidth use or cpu intensive applications. It might even have limited time service like say outside office hours.
We use to have a popular forum around here ran by a pub. It became to much work to maintain and the owner wasn't interested enough. It was suppose to be for regular visitors.
If it was only accessible locally and on its own wifi network you set it up once and it would work just fine. Not having access to the darts competition from home is a feature not a drawback.
You’d be reachable anywhere in the house, as the landline could start ringing with friends asking to play.
Reminds me of personal experience of course but also the "Less Than Three" video [0], which in turn reminds me of the GUNSHIP Art3mis & Parzival music video [1]. I'll probably never watch the Ready Player One movie again, but I'll likely watch the GUNSHIP video another 100x.
Went from “only available when at the PC” to “always online” overnight.
Got even funnier when someone worked out you could abuse the phone as a rather slow, but free, internet connection due to how poorly implemented the zero rating was done on those services :)
ICQ did support offline messages, from the beginning afaik, too. I had a 6-digit uin (485358 or something similar), until it got banned for running a bot (whoops).
To the sibling reply, I think AIM and ICQ did have interop on messages at some point, it was much later than when ICQ moved protocols to OSCAR and TOK though.
I vividly remember being amazed by offline delivery in Jabber, so at least one of ICQ or MSN must have not had it for me to even notice.
As I recall, originally, the ICQ client polled the server via UDP to see if it had any messages, and then you would do peer to peer for online messaging. But when you logged in, you'd get a cascade of the offline messages (uh, uh, uh, uh-oh)
I only remember Skype being "true" peer-to-peer, with your PC randomly becoming a presence/call relaying "supernode" if you had a publicly reachable IP and good connectivity. Different times!
But this was just for messaging (and file transfer), not for presence/buddy list which was all server driven.
In that time frame, few had firewalls or NAT or two computers at the same location, so (server mediated) peer to peer just worked unless you were on a corporate network.
I definitely used quick buddy from computers at my junior college (98-2000), but I don't remember using AIM express.
In any case, Meebo worked using the (back then) advanced, exciting magic of AJAX :)
A pox on Slack.
We were on dialup back then. You could only send messages with MSN if the other person was also using the household landline at the same time.
Yeah Microsoft did not exactly play fair back then. Even Apple today is not as anti competitive as Microsoft was.
Also, I don't recall ICQ being bloated. Maybe it was later on.
I suspect MSN/AIM/YM borrowed the idea within a few weeks or months.
My next phone was a Nokia 5800, one of the last Symbian ones.
I finally got something exactly like that in 2008 (both with mobile AIM clients, and as SMS and iMessage steadily overtook AIM for the purposes we used IM for), but it strikes me as poignant that as an adult, it wasn't really as meaningful to me as it would have been as a teen.
I guess what I'm saying is actually, I kind of get why the gen-z kids became so terminally online. I would have availed myself of the ability to socialize, privately, nonstop day and night!
I started to implement the number field sieve to demonstrate this, but got lost in the weeds and moved on to other stuff.
I still remember it but not the pass
Tried to login a few years back to see if any of my old Quake buddies happened to still use it, but couldn't. Support said unless I had the recovery email still, which was at bigfoot.com which has been dead for decades, I was out of luck.
I wonder if you had some ASCII characters, or those old custom-font-and-special-characters texts we used to use?
I can remember an unused IM account from a lifetime ago but not a single ffmpeg flag.
The brain remembers what it wants to remember.
Had it for many years then someone “hacked it” and took it. That was the end of it for me.
I find it amusing that I still remember this right off the bat despite not having used it for 15 years, but I don't remember my phone number from the same time period.
The early Internet was an amazing place.
it's crazy I can still remember this despite not having used it for maybe ...25 years?
That feeling is mutual.
Just logged in, there's nothing left.
I remember being so annoyed I hadn't signed up a few weeks earlier and gotten a 5-digit instead.
Just managed to login. Had one person on my contact list and he is dead...
Still remembered, always remembered
And it worked! All my old online friends from my childhood were there, my profile message, etc. While most were offline, a few showed up as online and I quickly messaged them!
But my excitement died down as no one responded. Were their accounts hijacked? Is that status invalid? I have no idea. But I was disappointed. It's still cool the service is up all this time.
I also didn't remember my ICQ# but luckly I found it on a backup from an old website I used to have.
There was also a page where me and my friends were trying to pool togheter our numbers and incentivize people to use it, back when ICQ was being demolished by MSN and AIM... it was a very grassroots attempt that ammounted to nothing lol, but oh whell, at least we tried :(
You served me well 177024717
- 114003124
I can't remember the last time I even thought about ICQ, much less had a client installed. But damn, end of an era
Same, it caught on like wildfire and everyone in my class, program and perhaps everyone with a computer in school used it. Network effect in action
This is from a time where you had to find an Ethernet drop to plug your laptop in to be available on ICQ
In any case, I've actually logged in from time to time and only 1 of my 9 friends from the late 90's as nerdy and nostalgic as I actually logged in the past decade and left me a message.
edit: Found a video of an old client working: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_pYWRfeYKs
ICQ was popular in russian speaking countries in 2006-2009 years, there even was application generator for mobile phones: you was able to choose emoji, styling and other things and receive link to download unique build for your J2ME phone. In the era of WAP it was really impressive
I do miss casually texting with people on the computer rather than the phone, and I don't think it's only due to nostalgia or having more leisure time back then:
- If someone was online, it would typically be a good time for a casual, interactive chat. Texting someone on the phone is (at least for me) rarely "live", because it usually happens at an inconvenient time for one of the parties.
- Much faster to type, and easier to copy-paste stuff from other places. Can communicate almost as effortlessly as a spoken conversation.
- Easier to multi-task in case of a slow reply.
I don't enjoy texting on the phone. Millennial logging out for the last time. AFK BRB.
This was true for ICQ as well, in a way. I used some java app on my Sony Ericsson phone back in the day to read and send ICQ messages, but of course back then you had to connect to the internet explicitly, phones weren't always online so it was of limited use but still cool.
This meant that if you used a custom client (which they didn't allow), you could just send HTML which got evaluated so you could force users to download stuff or send HTML forms or iframes
When this became semi public (in hacker circles) they went after the people talking about it with legal action instead of fixing their stuff
Here's another blast from the past.. List of ICQ exploits on neworder.box.sk, the website I learned my first 1337 h4xx0r skills from: https://web.archive.org/web/20040829081726/http://neworder.b...
My friend at the time, 101449 was in the first 1500 users; I was late to the game and joined later that afternoon.
I met three people by randomly searching by criteria who are still friends to this day. Erin from Niagara Falls was the first person I had an online voice conversation with. I went to visit Evgenia from Ukraine in St. Petersberg in 2004. I helped Juliana in Sao Paulo practice her English, and went to visit 13 years later.
The thing that was most amazing about the ICQ client was that it implemented a store-and-forward message queue, which was especially important in the dial-up era. That is, someone could send you messages while you were offline, and you'd get them when you logged in.
ICQ was also the first to implement Away, Invisible and DND modes.
While I'm sure that we edit out all of the rough edges in our rose colored memories, ICQ really was the first IM network that felt like a projection of our selves online. NNTP and IRC had their place, but they were radically different interaction modalities. ICQ got a lot of things right that we now take for granted, in an era where techno-optimism wasn't ironic.
Saying the number now it just rolls off my tongue, it is just so familiar, great times.
Serious question - why do so many people remember our ICQ numbers? I don’t remember what user-facing function it served. Was that actually the identifier we shared with people to connect?
I suppose it also came at a time for a lot of us where things seemed to wedge into our brains more easily.
Yes. It was like giving out your telephone number.
So, committing them to memory was just a thing. And our brains get less plastic with age. I can remember my home phone number from 1982, but not my last cell number (before the current one) although I used it for 3 years, as recently as 2014. The insane amount of information streaming in front of our senses probably also triggered some unconscious attitude adjustment (not going to bother remembering any of it, if it's important I'll write it down).
Unfortunately I only remember the first half of mine after so many years. In the age of smartphones, at least my brain degenerated to not be able to recall more than a handful of important phone numbers.
But also, I think, because my parents drilled that old number into me, because remembering it was a "lifeline".
You find a phone to use, however you do that, and dial the local emergency number (0118 999 881 999 119 725...3), and maybe they show up and take a report.
And then they leave.
Now, you're in the same situation you were in before (no phone, no wallet) -- nothing has really changed.
What happens next? What's your next move?
I don't even know where to begin getting copies of "all of my documents" online as a native US-born citizen.
> It's feels like a contrived scenario if you travel primarily in developed countries, and mostly urban areas. If I were going somewhere in the middle of nowhere, or a third world country where I'd be concerned about more likely to be targeted, maybe.
I got robbed and beat up walking back from the store in a very clean, well-lit area of a growing city of ~45,000 once -- in Ohio, of all places. I didn't consider myself a target then, and I don't consider myself a target now. But it happened anyway, and if it can happen to me in that seemingly-safe environment, then it can probably happen to anyone else in any other environment.
> I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but having grown up before cellphones and with no expectation of having easy access to a phone, this obsession with being able to easily contact someone just is very foreign to me still.
I'm not saying that your ideas don't have any merit. I also grew up before cell phones and was well into adulthood before they became common.
But I am saying these seem a lot of mental gymnastics to perform in justification of avoidance of the positively arduous and herculean task of...simply committing the phone number for a resourceful friend to memory.
---
And why? Well, because friends are awesome.
"Hey, I'm in San Francisco. I don't have my phone or my wallet. No, no, I'm OK -- I'll tell you about it later. Yeah, some money would help right now. Sure, I can call you back in an hour. Thanks man."
...and soon enough, that resourceful friend will have that sorted well-enough for me that I can at least buy some food somewhere and start getting back towards whatever "normal" is, just as I would do for them.
And if beaten up and robbed, it just seems inconceivable to me that if I can get to a phone to get help, I can't also subsequently get online.
It's not a lot of mental gymnastics - this discussion is the majority of the time I've spent on this in a lifetime. I just don't live in fear of anything like that happening. If I'm ever wrong, then so be it - there are far more risks far more worth caring about to me.
You're obviously free to avoid remembering anyone's phone number for the rest of your existence, and it certainly does not behoove me to attempt to saddle you with such a profound and monumentally exhausting mental debt.
But the ICQ number has stuck with me
Maybe was the easiest way to add people you knew in real life, esp if you didn't make your real name searchable. (Remember at the time people were more paranoid about staying anonymous on the Internet; this was before most social networks.)
>why do so many people remember
>I suppose it also came at a time for a lot of us where things seemed to wedge into our brains more easily.
That is why recalling phone numbers, large (mentally untoken-able) words, and the digits of PI all are far easier when done in the sing-song fashion - it is utilizing the highly-optimized linguistic/recall portion, we evolved to handle the near-rote-memorization required to allow our culture to survive.
I mean it was basically your phone number for chat. I'm sure many people remember their childhood phone number as well.
I actually tried to delete that UIN a few years ago, but the support folks wanted me to provide a few UINs from my contact list to verify ownership. No chance I’m going to remember those.
Yes, exactly.
Here's a free hypothesis: Maybe it was important to remember your ICQ number. Without it, your message history and contact list was out of reach. In that sense, it fits in the same mental space as a password. What I mean is, there was a cost to losing it. So, you were incentivized to commit it to memory in a way that you weren't with many other numbers.
In contrast, while it would be inconvenient to forget a friend's phone number if you wanted to chat with them, at least you had options. You could generally look them up in the white pages, or call a another friend and get their number, or just ask them when you saw that person again at school the next day.
So, the cost for not remembering a phone number was lower than the cost for not remembering your own ICQ number, and this probably made it mentally stickier.
... Another possibility is a confirmation bias. Maybe we're just not hearing from the 95% of ICQ users who can't remember their number.
I forgot what I had for lunch yesterday but somehow I can remember my ICQ number.
I'm going to miss it, even if it's not been used in decades.
I didn't even remember ICQ had numbers until I read the first comment in this thread posting theirs and most of the number immediately popped into my head, 10238* (cant remember last two).
Makes me wonder what other things in my brain are back in archive, just needing the right push to bring to surface.
I cannot even remember the birthdays of people close to me, let alone any phone numbers except my own. But I still remember that f*king 12-digit international phone number from almost 40 years ago...
oh and of course I remember my ICQ number ;-)
Human memory works in a weird way
I'm not sure what I ate yesterday for lunch, but I just tried my old ICQ, 6697979, and got in on the first try. The password was right in my head, 12 alphanumeric char which don't mean anything, and I never used it for anything else.
Conversely, today I had to use my domain password at work for a system not yet integrated with our 2-factor, and it was quite an effort to remember it, since I hadn't typed it in a week.
RIP, ICQ.
I learned to type on a keyboard by logging into ICQ and sharing that number with people I wanted to connect with. It felt like my internet address.
It's pretty jarring, as y'all know, so it doesn't do to have as the default sound, but it it's great for important contacts that don't message much.
Honestly it's a bewildering choice for the default "message received" sound of an IM client. It's so very alarming. I can only guess that the makers were expecting you to be a room away from your tower PC (with its deluxe 18" CRT display and mouse cables that required a screwdriver) to make sure you never missed a message.
These days, when you're never more than a layer of fabric away from your IM, it's a bit much. But man, effective.
Onwards and upwards! Bigger weapons than before!
Boggy B. took cover, he shivered on patrol.
The arms race: crazy, simply way out of control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0iqM_AnSuo
The ICQ Song, by Alchemy
I want to add it to https://www.stumbleback.net
1779900
So back in the day, these were known as Universal Internet Numbers, or UINs. You have to admire the sheer audacity of using that name for the user identifiers of a service you're building. I believe they were renamed to "ICQ#" later.
Today, I have to have one app for all the different ways to get ahold of someone. It's pretty annoying, but we did it to ourselves. Yay.
All FOSS.
But it's still a lot better than 5, 6, 10 different apps.
Also, it's "Pidgin", as in "pidgin English."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin
It's a word, not a weird made-up name.
You can also self host it
I even got a job offer from ICQ back in the day. One of the perks they offered was a small ICQ number ending in zeros.
I didn't take the job offer because I was in high school, though, and wasn't even looking for a job. It's unclear whether they knew that. I'd written some companion program and put it on the internet and they'd found it and were impressed. :)
I still remember going into my parents room to tell them I'm applying for a job and they had no idea what I was talking about. I submitted the application, and the Xoom staff had a good chuckle as they had no idea I was ~14 at the time.
I worked on some ICQ software in high school, and was the maintainer of large user base ICQ clone. I still own the domain: licq.org
Never got a single job offer, guess they saw my code and went running away ;)
2. SNR on those 16M people is probably well above average in the vector of most interesting people on the planet.
I literally meant 16 total people. To be fair, that was a bit of hyperbole, but the point is that there probably aren't a lot of people looking to use an "open source ICQ alternative" in 2024.
That doesn't mean that somebody shouldn't still do it, but it would probably be a passion project, more than something that would make money. At least that's my guess. :-)
And in reading up on OSCAR[1] just now, I only just found out that ICQ did use OCSAR as well (at least according to Wikipedia). I never knew that. I had always thought OSCAR was only used by AIM.
Live and learn...
I contacted the company, suggested they bridged it to other protocols, and pointed them at FOSS code that would let them do it. I got a snarky email back saying that what I proposed was impossible -- even though others had done it before. Idiots.
-- 73187508
I had absolutely no connection to the service at all, but the shutdown gave me a weird feeling of loss, perhaps because it was in visual form and the shutdown was recorded on video?
Imagine a world where all apps had numeric user ids and people memorized them.
Here's the ICQ song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va8dnGF3Xyw
I also remember various license plates my family had in the mid 90s, but I struggle to remember my own license plate number now. The only two phone numbers I know are mine and my wife's. I can still remember my high school's phone number though - for some really odd reason as I can't have phoned it much.
> I can still remember my high school's phone number though - for some really odd reason as I can't have phoned it much.
Any chance it was a number your parents made you learn, or on a phone list next to / on the phone?
How the hell I keep remembering it?!? I haven't used ICQ for more than 15 years?
A short ICQ number became a matter of pride in certain communities, as some kind of performative early-adopter grandstanding. I imagine that someone, somewhere, out there, is probably still quoting their five/six-digit ICQ number as a badge of honour
> You can chat with friends in VK Messenger, and with colleagues in VK WorkSpace
Was ICQ like Livejournal, where it had a lot more popularity and staying power in Russia than in the West?
Fun MSN story: I read you could put curse words in your name subtitle if you used 0x ascii hex codes for one of the characters.
So I pulled up the list of ascii codes and hoped that “beep” would work, but it did not make anyone beep. Then I tried null, and it made all my contacts go offline, and offline again as soon as they logged back in. Again and again. Except myself (can’t remember if that was because I used a 3rd party client aMSN) Hehe. Had people apologize to me for suddenly dropping mid convo.
Here's the announcement: https://vk.com/blog/blog131, the title "VKontakte in ICQ mode" is telling. Oh and the contest Pavel announced at the end of that post? I won that with my shoddy MFC app :P
Is the format.
Internet back then connected you to people who you'd not meet in everyday life, and ICQ was a new unusual place to discuss anything with them.
It gave you a new view of people you knew. I remember in the last grade at school I had some intimate conversations with a female classmate, which I couldn't imagine doing at school in front of many eyes.
It was a dating and meeting app too: rando people would write to other random people. Although these talks were superficial and today I'd see them disenchanting, back then it was an interesting alternatives to offline sociality.
A recall from 2003: me and sister having desktop computers, chatting with all the people on neighborhood LAN and sometimes messaging each other over ICQ -- too busy to walk to the next room and speak.
Then I used it at office work, mostly to appoint dates with girls from another department. At the time, in 2007, it wasn't exclusive anymore, but like a mark of being web-literate, and girls were easier about telling you a UIN rather than a phone.
Then social networks came, and even before mobile integration they were much richer -- all the life went there. Ah, good old days -- make a party, do stupid contests, take photos with a soapbox digital camera, and then pour the entire SD card in the meeting album -- no editing, no removal of closed or red eyed faces, or weird postures or opened mouths. Just let everyone see how fooly they were. And what was different from ICQ was that everybody was aware that everybody was aware. ICQ had no chance, LOL. (edit: And there was Skype too.)
The last time I opened it under Pidgin on Ubuntu in 2010-2011.
I was in elementary back then. Prior to ICQ my online friends and I used PowWow chat if you remember that. It had the funniest robotic voice chat.
edit: Wow PowWow was 1998, I thought it was way earlier than that. http://powwow.jazy.net/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_(chat_program) https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5bpjm/that-time-john-mcafee...
edit2: Wtf John McAffee made it
Today, the only multi-protocol clients you get is "Slack/Discord/Teams/etc as tabs inside electron". Every app is isolated and keeps their history.
Thank you for your service -- 286841327
I didn't have any friends on ICQ - they were all on AIM or MSN. But I was very active on ProBoards (a non-phpBB forum service) and ICQ was the only social icon that I was missing from my mini-profile, so I signed up so I would have something to put there.
Given how vain and overly-focused I was on appearances in that context, I cannot imagine how bad my mental health would have been if social media was available for me.
For those who want to experience ICQ once again, there's http://kicq.ru, an unofficial ICQ server that uses some very old version of the protocol so only QIP 2005 and some versions of Jimm work. Adium doesn't work, unfortunately. My number there is 480976.
9805028
What I really miss is the era when every chat service was on an open protocol so you could have a single app that supported everybody no matter what service they used.
It is an embarassment that in 2024 you still can't send someone an iMessage from a PC or Android phone. Shoot, messaging from a PC in general is hard. No easy SMS access, and even third party apps often have stupid things like "the app is actually running on your phone but you can forward message to some flaky and bloated electron thing on a PC if you really must."
I guess that explains their recommendation of VK Messenger as a replacement.
360487731
Go well.
The problem is that the legal system is misused to prevent adversarial interoperability.
Adversarial interoperability was never explicitly welcomed by gatekeepers, but back then nobody would think of suing over it, nor prosecuting such a case.
Nowadays, copyright law is used as a reason to shut those things down, even when the copyrighted content is actually third-party user-generated content or content you do have a license to access since it's freely accessible using the official client.
IRC
ICQ
AIM
MSN Messenger
Y! Messenger
Etc
You not only needed to know the ID but also the service to send it on, which is exactly the same situation today. Except for email
I saw someone commenting about accounts being deleted due to inactivity, so first I tried to find a way to search old accounts. Found in a website this link: https://icq.im/$YOUR_ICQ_NUMBER/en
Replace that by your ID. I checked some of the IDs in the comments here, and you can see the user name. But mine just shows [deleted], and the old description I wrote years, and years ago :-)
Searching I also ended up on this icq.com web page, that looks right out of Geocities: https://icq.com/cf/ate/externals/ma00b.htm
No idea what's that tool, and no way I am downloading it. But it's amazing to imagine what would be the "created" and "last modified" stats of the files being served there.
Thanks ICQ.
Feeling adventurous, I dug through my archives and found my old ICQ database and followed https://sec.sipsik.net/tuts/net/icq.txt and used the code at https://web.archive.org/web/20070209002044/https://rejetto.c... to decrypt my password...
Sadly it was the one I had tried :( It was a fun trip through nostalgia at least!
Many fond memories.
I never looked into the protocols in the background, but it was for most of the time very solid and reliable in delivering offline messages, with correct timestamps and all the stuff you would expect as normal.
But Skype was gaining popularity very quickly, and a lot of communication at work got switched from direct person-to-person ICQ or Yahoo Messenger messages, to Skype group chats and calls. Which was really frustrating given how messages were barely functional on Skype basically forever. It would regularly happen that I was offline for e.g. 30 min, someone would send me a message during that time, I would come back online, and then randomly receive that message 2 days later.
In any case - a really solid product, service and one of the big formative parts of my youth and early internet days. Thanks to all the people that made it happen.
It was the first way I chatted privately with a lot of people I met via stuff like internet forums or MUDs. Formed connections that lasted for years (though nothing lasts forever).
I was told to turn on my TV the morning of 9/11 after getting back from my 8am class (central time) by someone on ICQ. I spoke with a friend who was expelled from college to keep in touch with her (for a time) via ICQ.
Thinking back, it is strange how easily I let ICQ go, because it was tied up with a lot of good early internet memories, but I guess that is the way the world works, or more specifically the flow of human emotions across time.
Miranda IM, open source plugin based architecture, was the best client for ICQ.
There was a fun plugin that notified you if anyone read your away message. Good trolling potential.
(1) Yes IRC far predated ICQ but the linguistic norms there differed significantly from ICQ, it was all in my presentation, you had to be there :)
Atari is dead. Shoutcast is dead. Compuserve and GEnie are long dead, AOL is dead too. Outside of forums like these, nobody knows who made the first personal computers or smartphones, because it doesn't matter to them.
It's a lot easier to build the second insant messaging system than the first because you can see how it works before you build it.
I was friend with this girl at school. She mentioned she didn't use ICQ anymore. I asked why.
She said she got so many messages that she couldn't open ICQ without crashing her computer.
It is very similar to hitting product market fit. There is an incredibly pull. The CAC is very low. And etc.
That was how I learned what it was like to be really good-looking.
But yeah, I bought a 6 digit number on eBay for 5-10 bucks too ;)
Sincerely,
156876
I still remember that. Sigh.
If they still have those account creds and first names, y’all reckon VKontacte has our old messages? :X
Oh well, have great memories, pouring one out for ICQ tonight.
There are obvious advantages to newer IM/texting clients, but these old ones were a pretty vital part of my teenage years. The main reason I learned how to type properly was so I could communicate with my friends better on AIM. I spent way too much time figuring out how to use alternative IM clients like Trillian and gAIM so I could avoid advertisements, I spent a lot of time customizing my AIM profile and playing with different fonts, and having friends spam mean with "chain messages". I loved seeing creators from NewGrounds sign on at 4am and still be willing to talk to me.
I'd be a very different person today without AIM and ICQ, for better or worse.
Iirc the .dat file was largely readable if you opened in a text editor; have you tried?
After posting I went hunting myself and found some interesting things to try:
An ICQ DB spec from Miranda NG: https://github.com/miranda-ng/miranda-ng/blob/master/plugins...
Java exporter tool: https://github.com/patric-r/ICQExport
Networks have topologies and paths. The social graph matters on facebook because you get connected to your friend's friends which is a core feature of the platform. This is not the case with chat platforms.
A social network puts the connections you have with other people prominently on display for everyone to see. The number of "friends" you have is a central social status metric on social networks.
I remember a few years ago when I logged back in after all those years it asked me to change my password ... because the old one was three letters long, definitely from a different era :)
My older brother had a 5 digit number, and I remember knowing mine by heart at some point.
I also remember very early putting together like a mental map where different regions were on instant messaging. It became more clear as MSN Messenger was being rolled out that eastern europe stayed on ICQ and AOL while US and western Europe were being migrated over to MSN faster.
edit: ah, they're doing the odious "use an sms to allow your account to be compromised login" instead of passwords. Then they say "your account has been compromised" until you add a phone number
I still have to find a tool as good as ICQ was. Of course, there were bugs and I would expect more from it today (I'm thinking of the app back in 2004), like video support, but still, no one bested it UX and features.
No idea where it came from or how it ended up there. I don't think they had a Canadian office. I've had it since 2015, it's fun to wear out and find your fellow xennials in the wild.
Anyone have a theory as to where the shirt came from?
Even if something new came along now, it won't recreate the magic that was the internet of yesteryear.
At this point, it is us that are too different. The nostalgia only has sentimental value.
Thank you for preserving these memories, ICQ.
Always wished I could get back in, lost my password around 2005.
At least now I can stop wishing I suppose. Boy this make me way more sad than I expected.
Also funny, the kakao new message sound is pretty close: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osUbo0HsArM
Such a good number. This account is where I learned the lesson "don't use a password from the dictionary". :-(
It was sad to see lose to much MUCH inferior chat networks, like MSN messenger. It was back when Microsoft could crush anyone (even the chat system), by just shipping it with Windows.
Sad to see it go even if I haven't used it since a 5 digit handle meant something.
I tried to log in by site right now and my password isn't recognized anymore; and it also seems to be loading something from tiktok there
But it’s gone. I remember all my old passwords from 2000. But I also remember about 10 years ago changing those everywhere to secure passwords. I even distinctly remember doing this for ICQ despite not using it anymore. But it’s not on my password manager.
> You can chat with friends in VK Messenger and with colleagues in VK WorkSpace
Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell no
My goodness, I still remember my ICQ number, 7 digits in all and my first treasured password.
ICQ was neat and the brief interplay with direct to SMS was chef’s kiss. But after the acquisition, it became bloated, messy, and no bueno.
I used to have a 6 digit too, but lost it long ago. ICQ was an important part of my youth. ICQ and AOL Chatrooms were the earliest places where I learned I could find groups to talk with about similar interests.
Farewell ICQ, thanks for the good times.
EDIT: How would I even log in to take a peek? It won't accept my US phone # and my (old, insecure) passwords that I likely used no longer work (and I can't seem to use that number as the login!)
https://replit.com/@pmarreck/Random-and-dictionary-password-...
I never, and eventually picked YM instead few years later.
I miss the little sounds it made, "hoot Hoot"
I was really surprised when a recovery mechanism was launched many years ago. My account wasnt comprised. It still had the same dumb password from way back -- my first highschool girlfriends name and a number.
I have fond memories of using it, but the end of ICQ doesn't hit me nearly as hard as the end of Geocities did.
Dozens of megabytes of text, jokes, arguments, dramas, casual and professional socialising, and hundreds of new acquaintances that have shaped my interests in life. Thanks for an interesting 2000s.
"VK Messenger"
I'd guess most people going to the website would have no idea what VK Messenger is.
I liked it but the problem was that it didn't have contact list sync, server-based scrollback and other mod cons. And of course that they totally screwed it up with adware.
Though this one actually outlasted my expectations: AOL owned... But why does it mention VK?
Because ICQ was bought by VK in 2010
Chat apps aren't cheap like the old days, now they require a large moderation staff. Maybe AI will change that?
2412581 - I don't think I'll ever forget my UIN
Proud to be part of this generation of "instant messengers". Long, long before texting, me and my peers were living the future life!
My theory is that FB didn't want to enable away messages because then people would just set it once and not log in for a long time. It's a shame that a feature that was common 20 years ago is now only starting to make a comeback.
-- 10923345
I still miss that “watooo” sound when you received a message.
Good times. Thanks for being part of my first days on the internet. Rest in peace.
So many relationships had across that IM client. Store-and-forward was the clutch feature.
Sad to hear it's shutting down, but I didn't even know it still existed.
Don't ask me how I remember this number that I haven't used in 20-odd years, but maybe that alludes to the impact it made on the community at large.
RIP ICQ
I think I remember my number because back then when you had to reinstall software or put it on new machine you always went by your number, instead of your email or username. That's why I think I still remember it :)
Anyone knows about NINA chat? They're trying to keep MSN, AIM, ICQ and others alive. I wonder if someone else is using it?
RIP to an absolute legend.
I used icq a lot for personal and work communication
15574041
While we've undoubtedly gained so much, we did lose something very special.
“Fledermaus is online”
See ya'!
Terrible, terrible news. So many events in my life are linked to ICQ...
Do we have a chance to save it?
Not an elite 6 number UIN, but at least on the bottom side of 7 digits.
- 1939647
Sincerely, 1339782
I wish internet didn't evolve. mIRC and ICQ were magical.
- Have you ever heard of ICQ? - No
I couldn't find how to check for numbers so I just typed in icq.com/xxxxxxxxx and saw my name. Then I thought well no way I will remember my password, but then I remembered I used the same five letter password all the time back then. And voila it works. Who needs a password manager when you are naive, computers are slow and you need to access memories from times when you weren't overloaded with information.
I will say I don't have many fond memories of it, it was difficult to use it in the days of dial up. Things also changed quicker than today, I think from 2002-2010 we went from ICQ to yahoo to Skype to msn to others and back. But it was my first <3
not used in years but very good memories!
Spent a lot of my childhood using it.
Yup... still remember it! Crazy!
Sad to see this go.
43411944
Thank you ICQ!
I haven't used ICQ in years, but my heart is still sad to receive this news.
Any community you build inside a walled garden can be taken from you. I do think that is important to keep in mind.
The idealism of the internet in the 80s and 90s never could survive past the growth phase.
Both are doable with modern servers and clients thanks to v3 chathistory. Ergo (server) and Goguma (mobile client) in particular make this work very nicely.
What it does technically could be replicated by current technologies.
Emojis, video streaming, screen streaming.
Discoverability by the masses is a tough problem to solve because there is really no way to monetize it. Does Discord just rely on Nitro subscriptions?
It's a gold mine of data for things like market research, ad targeting/fingerprinting, and more recently AI training.
I then switched over to https://www.irccloud.com and it's such a improvement as I can use it on my phone, now I'm pretty active again and I kinda missed it.
Alternatively there's many bridges these days so you can use Matrix with one of the many apps supported.
IRCCloud does. Or if you want an open source stack: Soju as bouncer, Gamja as web interface, and Goguma as Android app. If you have a paid Sourcehut account you get Soju+Gamja hosted for you at https://chat.sr.ht/ .
I'm not sure The Lounge and Quassel support push notifications, but they otherwise fit your requirements.
You replied to my post where I said I switched to IRCCloud and the person asked for self hosted alternatives to it :P
Alternatively using a Soju[1] with Goguma[2] for phone and Gamja[3] for web could work; FWIW, I use Soju, but not the other two.
1: https://sr.ht/~emersion/soju/