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Comment by bcx | Hacker News Reader

This post made me wonder what happened to ICQ.

"(2010) AOL has sold ICQ to Digital Sky Technologies (DST), Russia's largest Internet company, for US$187.5 million. DST's offer was apparently more attractive than those of Russia's ProfMedia and China's Tencent. ICQ, originally released in 1996 and bought by AOL in 1998 for US$407 million, was one of the world's first major instant messaging systems. Although largely forgotten in English-speaking countries, it remains widely popular in Central Europe, Russia, and Israel. Moscow News has additional coverage of the deal."

(https://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/05/01/1516234/russian-com...)

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Some more context: DST was renamed to Mail.Ru Group, and is now owned by one of the russian oligarchs (Alisher Usmanov). They also control all the largest russian social networks (some like VK through hostile takeovers) and is widely reported to pipe all the data directly into russian secret services

DST remains the notable VC investor.

Interesting note... Tencent owns QQ. QQ was originally called OICQ, Open ICQ.

There was a great acquired episode on Tencent. https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/season-3-episode-10-tencent

Note: "remains widely popular" was already arguable when that story was written in 2010 and is definitely not true in 2020.

At least in Israel no one was using it after ~2005 or so.

(Legacy) ICQ has widespread adoption in the criminal underground. If you were a security service it probably had the highest signal to noise ratio of any network.

My take on it is that when MSN Messenger came out, they stored the contacts "in the cloud" (which was a new concept back then). So let's just say hypothetically that Windows 95 crapped the bed with a true blue screen of death, you'd re-install MSN Messenger and bam, your contacts were back. ICQ kept contacts local and if you lost them, you lost them.

True, but they caught up within one year and had the feature. Then they heavily bloated the client, then released a "lite" version which really brought them back on the map. Then facebook came and suddenly it was cooler to communicate non-instantly for some time. :)

> it was cooler

Cooler for some. Infuriating for others.

Do you remember that feature that you could use to "call someone's attention"? It would make a lot of noise and the window would shake like crazy in your face.

Found it. The "nudge" feature.

https://youtu.be/9QrS2cEyNrA?t=70

Yea, but that was a time when most people worked on desktops. Had no mobile phone or laptop.

That brings back memories, nudge bombing via client side automation / progs.

You could also invite anyone to a group chat, forcing them to join, and then you could nudge all of them at the same time. Best feature ever.

ICQ had a powerful global search, you could search by nickname, real name, country, city, date of birth and so on.

Back in the day nicknames were still pretty unique.

Also had a search by interest feature if I remember right.

There were no programming classes back then at my school and I found someone, half way across the world, who patiently taught me programming everyday.

IT was great for dating around 2000. Search by gender, age, city, open conversation and try my luck. Ended up in ~4 year long relationship from random contacts.

> it remains widely popular in Central Europe, Russia

It used to be popular in Russia to the point of being synonymous to instant messaging, but it's since been largely forgotten. My current circles use VK and Telegram. WhatsApp is also somewhat popular apparently but not so much around me. If ICQ ever pops up in conversations these days, it's always something nostalgic (also, back then no one used the atrocious official client).

AOL missed an opportunity to create a cross compatible family of AIM, YIM, ICQ. Different apps with different features, or different interfaces targeted at different audiences, that can all do roughly the same thing.

You might want to take a look at adium. It was the bees knees, I used it on mac years ago to manage multiple chats.

Adium.im

Ah, now I miss Meebo again, which was like adium but browser-based.

Im saying the other way around. One protocol, 3 clients for 3 demographics.

>>This post made me wonder what happened to ICQ.

Same here... I haven't even thought about it since the turn of the century!

I only used it a couple times. A colleague asked me to install it so we could work together on a project. If I recall right I started getting messages from people I didn't know so I deleted it shortly after installing it.

>it remains widely popular in Central Europe, Russia, and Israel.

They have like 200k users now, lol

The sale was actually blocked by the federal government for a period of time and AOL continued to run the back end servers for icq until just a few years ago.

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