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Comment by godot | Hacker News Reader

I hadn't used ICQ since the 90s and maybe early 2000s. The screenshots of ICQ New on the site certainly look quite similar to Whatsapp Web. I'm kind of surprised that there's active development in ICQ all these years even though I don't know of anyone personally who still uses it. Maybe ICQ is active in other parts of the world?

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>I don't know of anyone personally who still uses it.

I always liked ICQ, but there was always a tad bit of friction remembering huge strings of numbers as practical IDs, and the naming schemes came way later.

11984431 or whatever doesn't roll off the tongue very well.

I have no idea how, but my 8 digit ICQ user id immediately springs to mind, 20 years later. The mind works in mysterious ways.

Mysterious ways indeed... Somehow I remember and can recite a 16 character hex ID for my account on Flipnote Studio on the Nintendo DS

FCKGW, ring a bell?

What a weird thing to connect with a stranger on. I typed that so many times in my teenage years...

Checking in, also 8 digits, still memorized all these years later.

As do i. 32939464 probably haven't touched it in near 20 years ( guessing about 18 ). And whilst nostalgia is great, it would be great to free up memory sections of the brain like this :)

"591007" does that make me and ICQ OG?

Mine was six digit as well,but can't remember it other than the first digit was 8, so a bit after you signed up.

344838

But Mail.ru deleted old accounts. So...

Might want to check, I logged into mine (272605) recently

I did. I wouldn't write it without checking. I was able to log in half a year ago or so. But now - https://icq.im/344838 [Deleted]

They even tell you that you can't restore in anymore.

mine was 522826 but has probably been lost to the sands of time

When I would reserve a book at the public library, I'd get an automated phone call when the book arrived. The phone call always began by listing off my library card number.

So I know my first library card number was 1000102772901. I had to replace the card a few times, getting new numbers, but I only ever remembered the first one.

Same for me. I don't remember virtually any other numbers.

That's funny! I tried to remember it and typed what came to mind first into gmail and I got a hit from an archived GoogleTalk session from 2006. Layers upon layers of computer archeology.

72873246. Can’t remember my other number (same length, also starting with 7) but I have saved it somewhere. It was the main messenger in Germany when I grew up. It’s really not harder than remembering a phone number, and back then, I used it more often.

On the topic of New ICQ, it looks like all those other multi-user messengers. I wish everyone would switch to Jabber were there are clients for people who don’t have group messaging as their primary use case.

It was widely popular in Russia perhaps because '11984431' rolls off the tongue much better than explaining a string of latin characters like "s like dollar sign, not like the Russian s".

Same in China with numbers: https://newrepublic.com/article/117608/chinese-number-websit...

It looks like a brand new project from scratch, with just the name in common with ICQ of the 90s.

Certainly I can't see a way of logging in with my icq number from back then

In the upper right there's a "login with password" link. I logged in successfully using my old number there just now.

Interesting. Fairly sure I remember my password from back then, but that doesn't work.

I get a "you cannot recover the password", maybe my account was too unused for too long

It has just been updated a lot between then and now. While ICQ died out in the west, it has consistently been the largest IM app in Russia and parts of Eastern Europe.

I used it almost daily up until maybe two years ago, when they finally cut off third-party client programs.

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