What Ever Happened to ICQ? (2019)

ICQ seemed to struggle with competing with MSN Messanger and AOL Instant Messanger, despite the first mover advantage. While those on the net (at least in the UK) in the late 90s has ICQ, MSN and AIM seemed more popular with latecomers just a couple of years later. I guess Network effects aren't as strong when you have a rapidly growing market.

It was 20 years ago, but my lasting memory is that they went down the road of piling more and more adverts into the client, which certainly turned me off. That said I never had an AIM account and I rarely used MSN messenger.

There was something about that number though that makes it stick in my mind 20 years after I stopped using it. Perhaps it was a sign of both the time (when we remembered phone numbers) and my age (late teens), it was my first "identifier" that was mine - not the house phone number, and it predated widespread mobile numbers by a few years.

The article doesn't really explain what happened to ICQ. It seems it was replaced by social networks which made building the social graph way simpler (you could find your friends by their names) and had messaging functionality. And once you have more friends there why use anything else?

Then came mobile-native messengers like WhatsApp and Telegram. Of course, ICQ also was native. I was running Jimm on my Nokia 6600. But it wasn't built for mobile as a product, wasn't focused on that.

By the way, has anything seen a good article on the demise of XMPP/Jabber/Gtalk?

I don't remember my ICQ number anymore (I was about 13-14 during my usage period) but I do remember using ICQ to send the Back Orifice trojan to friends then spawning an endless number of eSheep on their desktops, taking screenshots and laughing like crazy.

Back when our internet connections prevented talking on the telephone, ICQ was invaluable. Those were the days.

I dipped my toes back into Ultima Online (released in 1997) last year for the first time in about 15 years. ICQ was the dominant out-of-band communication technology used by players when I was active (early to mid 00s). Since UO didn't allow talking with people you were in a party with unless you were near each other, it was common to put your ICQ number in your in-game profile.

Upon returning in 2020, I ran into some old friends (now retired) in-game pretty quickly and found out that a lot of them still use ICQ to communicate, although many have moved on to Discord. I checked the profiles of random people walking by in towns, and saw ICQ numbers alongside other (apparently current) info.

Neat that the continuing lineage of the original client is still on today’s app stores, though re-thought a bit in 2020:

”Mail.ru Group developed the ICQ New messenger based on the original ICQ, the company told Kommersant. It has been available in application stores since April 6 and is installed by updating the existing messenger.”

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/icq-messenger-video-calling/id...

I think it just hit version 10.0 from mail.ru team. Surprised the article references version 10 back in 2019, as the version on my iPad is 9.9 from 24 Dec 2020, and the pending update is version 10. Maybe desktop and mobile versions differ?

As the article notes, client was launched in 1996 from Mirabilis, an Israeli company, AOL bought the client in 1998, and then mail.ru bought it in 2010. On mobile, they relaunched as “ICQ New” at version 9.0.1 in spring 2020.

Interesting timing. Today's WSJ has an article: "Dropping WhatsApp? Nostalgia Drives Users to ICQ"

WhatsApp users around the world who are worried about the company’s shifting policy on data privacy are flocking to rival messaging apps such as Signal and Telegram.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dropping-whatsapp-nostalgia-dri...

I really missed ICQ when it started to die down with introduction of other messengers, which took over. I think mostly Skype was responsible, at least in my circles due to free audio calls... In any case, I still have my 6 digit UIN which works, despite I was told year or two ago it was deleted due to inactivity.

I recall the reason that ICQ dropped out of favor in some of the groups that I frequented was that it was purchased by a Russian company and those users thought that the Russians were going to be tracking individuals who used the service.

I remember setting my status as 'Free for chat' and having people send me a hello whom I actually became online-friends with. It was a fun little feature, back when bots and weaponized trolling wasn't really a thing yet.

Wow. I remember that UI. A lot of geezers around here, but still some of us are fresh and young with our eight-digit numbers.

I have no idea if mine still works. Any email that was ever tied to it is long gone.

Edit: I had to check. “Cannot recover password”.

Incredibly my ICQ account from 1999 is still working. I just logged in probably for the first time since 2006. Most of my contacts have vanished though. Only four left of about 50.

I still have my 6-digit ICQ from when I was in university. Prior to Napster we would share our music collection over ICQ. By the time we graduated most of my contacts were on AIM. I only began using it again once I moved abroad and my co-workers, mostly East European, were on it. They knew I was old based on the number of digits in my UID :-).

Each subsequent company I worked at had a different preferred chat app: ICQ, AIM, Skype, MSN.

My ICQ number is etched into my brain 82875759. Such a huge part of my early internet usage (that and IRC).

The one feature I remember and loved the most was a red balloon that appeared on your birthday. That icon added the perfect amount of excitement in a world with seemingly fixed icons (the online/offline icons never changed)

It started with way more features, that even today, were never paralleled with real time messaging. The one I particularly remember is that you could see people typing, as they were typing. It was really a modern marvel.

Was it just too open? Everything has to be funneled through a large corporate infrastructure or it magically disappears? Wasn't there an open ICQ project going on at one point?

Or we can't have nice things?

It's been 24 years yet I remember my ICQ number. It's so weird as the number isn't easy either neither I was an addict icq user.

Wow turn back the clock! I always liked ICQ. I had a 6 digit account # too! I think I joined in 1997 or so?

  >AOL must have saw the writing on the wall 

Dearie me!

whatever happened to 7th sphere is what I want to know...

"ICQ, short for the phrase “I Seek You,” laid the groundwork for standalone instant messaging clients when it arrived in November 1996. Think about how long ago that was...

Microsoft’s trailblazing Windows 95 was barely a year old, Nintendo had just introduced the N64, and those with a reason to have a cell phone actually used it to talk on.

Launched after less than two months of development from Israeli company Mirabilis, it predated and influenced many of the popular chat programs of the era including AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger."