ICQ will stop working from June 26 | Hacker News Reader

ICQ will stop working from June 26

icq.com

1,085 pointsUncle_Sam746 comments

I will forever treasure my ICQ memories.

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.

ICQ was the chat tool of the democratic internet, or internet of the people if you prefer the term.

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.

First thought: I had assumed ICQ was long dead. It seemed impossible anything from that era could still be running. IRC is of course, through the grace of an ecosystem, but it is a tiny fraction of what it was.

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 could not be more with you on this.

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.

> when people all of a sudden switched to a worse alternative, MSN

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.

Totally remember the switch to MSN. You are entirely correct. It was the beginning of the end.-

(I seem to recall MSN having some killer feature or another that made people switch. Or just critical Maas, with Windows.)

Listening in Winamp to one of only a few dozen possible songs that I had carefully downloaded.

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.

ICQ was nice but everyone moved on to Yahoo Messenger. That was the bomb. Truly unbelievable Yahoo didn't capitalize on that. Everyone used it.

This resonates a lot. When MSN become the norm was a big hit, then Windows Live and many people scattered around, left was Facebook but now only with IRL friends. Most alternatives since ICQ have been worse.

> 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.

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.

> The sounds it made

To this day, my text notifications ring "hey ho"

>And no, this is isn’t some form of Ostalgie where we long for past days of hardship with tender feelings.

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

to me it all started going downhill when people all of a sudden switched to a worse alternative, MSN

I get it, and wholly agree.

> It was rather a feeling that perhaps other Brazilians will share: a longing, saudade, for the simpler (yes) but better and more poetic 90s

I am from Argentina, and share your same feelings.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Everybody in Germany used ICQ. MSN and ICQ were concurrently popular in different regions. Everybody I knew from the US or other English-speaking parts of the world used MSN. There was no mass move from ICQ to MSN that lead to ICQ's demise, they basically both died at the same time when Facebook came out to the general public.

Wasn't icq the client where to send messages, you had to use alt+i? That alone was the worst possible ux choice for a chat client

This makes me sad. I mean, I haven't logged in in about 20 years now, and couldn't if I wanted to (don't have the password or access to the email address).

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.

I have similar sentimental memories of ICQ.

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 :)

[1] https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/

I just logged in for the first time in over 25 years a few weeks ago. I found https://web.icq.com/ which does not require an email address: only the ID and password. And back then I used a single password for everything.

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.

Same for me but the day I will really cry a little will be when mIRC dies. It was my introduction to instant effortless free worldwide communication. Of course I haven't used it for decades but it calms me that it is still very alive.

I remember the music/sound when ICQ used to load up. The logo was brilliant. Nostalgia. Circa 1999-2001 when I used it heavily. Best part though: finding strangers and becoming online friends with many of them (without worrying about scams etc).

58843787 Managed to remember it along with my password from 20+ years ago and it allowed me to login! Really amazing actually it's been around this long.

I wonder how many people went to icq.com and first provided their phone number thinking it was mandatory, then realized there was a "Login with password link", then went back, put in their ICQ UIN, and tried every last password they've used for the past 20 years before finding the one that worked? Neat trick, Russia!

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.

just logged in for the first time in 20 years. actually remembered my ICQ number and password! the contact list didn't seem to survive though

Man, that's how I felt about MSN Messenger and XFire and Google Talk...

4125222

I still remember it but not the pass

3048666 Pretty long but with cool number in it. I thought I forgot a password but looks like my account was deleted, although it still has funny description typical for a young boy. Friendship started and ended entirely in icq, relationship, whole other things. It was the era for me for sure

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 had a 6 digit one, then lost it, then got 49053668. I've forgotten many passwords but never this. I actually could login to the web app, using the oldest password I used that I can remember, but it doesn't show any old contacts except one. Oh well. So long and thanks for all the <s>fish!</s> great moments!

edit: Found a video of an old client working: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_pYWRfeYKs

Hard to realise how cultural waves come and go. Humbling

5 digits ICQ number is a great achievement

> It was my main method of electronic communication in college

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

As someone with a similarly low icq number but I lost the authentication details, I’m happy it’s gone and I don’t need to worry that I can’t remember my password anymore

Oh my, I did not know it still existed. My very first romantic connection was made on ICQ and then MSN Messenger. Can't believe how fast time flies!

I have a 7 digit number but I remember it still after all these years lol Was able to login still.

Six digit UIN holder, last used 2009.

haha... this sounds so familiar ;)

3294067

Good memories from a more innocent time. The ICQ client truncated long filenames in the UI, so you could send "image.jpg (50 spaces) .exe" which would open an embedded picture and install a back-door while just seeming like regular picture.

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.

ICQ even had a realtime chat feature that showed keystrokes as they were typed.

I only use the phone to send messages when I'm not at home, otherwise I use the computer. One of the best things about Telegram is their good desktop client, they even have online indicators like ICQ.

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.

don't forget they had terrible security even for the time. In their client you could do text customizations like bold, italic, etc. and they did it by just sending HTML over the wire.

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

101919 here. My account got hacked in 1999 and so it's been 25 years since I've been able to login, and yet I remember my UIN the way most people remember their first phone number.

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.

Took me a while to recall mine, but 13427018.

Saying the number now it just rolls off my tongue, it is just so familiar, great times.

ICQ profiles were the proto Myspace

65005229 instant recall. Good bye ICQ ;/

1303789

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.

When you joined ICQ you received a UIN and that was the only publicly searchable method to connect to other people. You could update your profile with email or username, and manually make that public, but it wasn't searchable by default. If you wanted to connect to a stranger (and the stranger didn't want their email public at the time), you would usually just use their UIN.

It is from a time when we were used to remember phone numbers, and where we shared our phone numbers to keep in touch (calls, sms). ICQ directly picked on that and it was just another „phone number“.

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.

I remember the phone number of my great aunt who lived in East Germany. It was a 12-digit number (including country code). We called her once, maybe twice a year, and usually my mother was dialling. I was maybe around 8 or 9 at the time (it was around 1988).

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

  >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.

The ~2million years we spent around campfires, repeating oral traditions of our forefathers, instilled a phonetic/rhythmic/mnemonic mechanism of action for remembering "arbitrary" information.

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.

> Was that actually the identifier we shared with people to connect?

Yes. It was like giving out your telephone number.

It's a combination of HN users self-selecting for certain traits, and ICQ typically having been used ~20-25 years ago when our brains were a lot more plastic.

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.

831364 but suffered an account takeover. ICQ shutting down mildly eases this long torment of losing the 6-digit account.

I think it showed it in the client along with your name handle.

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.)

That's cause we used to have to remember everything. We don't anymore. This guys explains it more hilariously than I ever could.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3bRvSfLV7R/

I agree with the suggestion that people just don't commit as many things to memory anymore, but that doesn't explain why we still remember certain random numbers from so long ago, while forgetting others. I can instantly recall my ICQ number, but there are plenty of old friends' phone numbers I've forgotten, and those were people I called multiple times a week for years.

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.

Back in the nineties… I set the country of my ICQ account randomly. It was Vanuatu. One day someone contacts me and ask “are you from Vanuatu?”, so I checked and she was from Vanuatu! So I tell her the truth: “I’m not. Are you?” And she answers “No, I’m from Venezuela, I missed my country by one in the config... Later I searched for people on Vanuatu and we two are the only ones“ :)

All I can say is: "Uh oh!"

https://youtu.be/RhGHerssyk4

I know this doesn't add much value to the discussion, but I was really proud of my UIN when I was a teenager. And this may be my last chance to flaunt it, so here it is:

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.

Back in the day, messaging was pretty awesome. You could use an app like Pidgin and pretty much talk to anyone no matter what color their bubbles were.

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.

489151 here.

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. :)

This makes me very sad. Used ICQ throughout Uni in 1999 and met a girl via random chat. We messaged each other for about a year then thought I’d fallen in love — travelled halfway around the world to finally meet her. It didn’t work out but what an experience. RIP ICQ.

Well... I don't know that they ever officially released a protocol spec, but libpurple implements ICQ so at least enough of the protocol was reverse engineered or understood somehow to allow for OSS clients. So I suppose somebody could start from there and build a compatible server. Of course it might wind up only being compatible with Pidgin and other libpurple based clients, and the market for this is probably approximately 16 people worldwide. But still, it would be kinda fun.

I freaked my girlfriend out once because I had my (desktop, a large tower!) computer connected to my stereo. I had left for some reason and there was no music playing, but ICQ would play a little knocking sound when someone logged in. She had heard it three times from the living room, scanned every door and window to find out who was knocking :-)

I hope the last message sent on ICQ will be as poetic as the last message on AIM (according to https://justanman.org/posts/the-last-message-sent-on-aim/)

I probably won’t install the suggested replacement of VK Messenger, I have to say. No more 71966195.

> ICQ will stop working from June 26

> 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?

For everyone proudly displaying their old ICQ numbers, just be aware that there are still sites that have some of the info tied to the numbers archived (presumably what was made public/status). So, there may be some easily-access publicly identifiable information that you don't want associated with your current HN username. (I just did a search and I found that my old icq# had a phone number linked to it)

Oh man, so many memories... Got ICQ in late 1998, and I remember my UIN as well, suprisingly -- unlike the dozen of mobile phone numbers I had over last 20 years.

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.

My number was 163766, funny how I'll never forget it. Also I've only seen a handful of people with lower numbers than me. I remember when there used to be an ebay market for selling your 6 digit numbers. IIRC they started at 100000? And those were all employees.

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

The good thing with the time of ICQ was that it was common that 3rd party messengers implemented the protocol. I used QiP and Pidgin. With Pidgin, it was possible to have all chat history across different chat networks (MSN, ICQ, IRC, Jabber) and accounts in once central place. I still have the chat history to this day.

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

All these wonderful stories... mine is much sillier.

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.

They somehow deleted/deactivated my account several years ago. Not that I used it much in the last 15 years :)

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.

Even though it was mostly just Russians wanting to practice their English last time I used it a couple of decades ago I will miss this service.

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.

ICQ was the primary tool for my friends and I to play games online ( quake, doom, starcraft, etc ). Not only with each other but people all around the world. Every time we joined a server our list of icq friends kept increasing. I still remembering coming home from school and immediately checking icq. The mid 90s to early 2000s was a real special time.

Wow. People have been keeping the lights on all this time? Incredible dedication. Wishing them many thanks for the amazing years, when the internet felt purely good and we had our lives ahead of us. It meant so much to see the “online” indicator of your love, lit up.

Go well.

Reminds me of a simpler time when messaging was universal, not a Machiavellian marketing scheme to generate social friction in order to sell more phones.

I was trying a few old passwords, but looks like my account was deleted, probably due to inactivity.

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.

I'm sure most people know this already, but ICQ stood for I Seek You.

I still remembered my id from all those years ago, 1569200. I was excited to read others were logging in with their old numbers, so I tried the password I thought I had used, but no luck.

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!

RIP ICQ.

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.

I didn't realize it still did. Wow, such memories.

Since others are posting about ICQ.

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.

Official ICQ client got bloated for every release. Security issues and lots of spam.

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.

Oh wow, didn't think it was still around! Don't remember my id number any more, but had great fun using centericq over SSH. Simpler, better times. So long and thanks for all the fish!

Hasn't it not actually been ICQ for a while now? I thought the original service with the numbers (387175) was shut down and replaced with something else entirely at some point.

RIP ICQ. I still have logs of chats from highscool. It was really my first foray into the idea of chat. I remember that I once did a presentation for a linguistics class on the use of emoji and the various shorthands that showed up in chat and people were actually interested because it was so new(1).

(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 :)

ICQ had a first mover advantage, and lost it. But why?

ICQ has taught me that I wasn't good looking.

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.

Goodbye from 201253

Many years ago go a girl who liked me gifted a 6 digit icq number.

I still remember that. Sigh.

Wow. Blast from the past. Just tried to log in after 20 years and it worked…but I didn’t get farther than it requiring full name and a phone number and lots of other mobile web badness before noping out.

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.

I had no idea that ICQ was still around, but now I'm sad; end of an era. I was more of an AIM guy than ICQ, but I had a tendency to bother creators on Newgrounds, some of which would leave their ICQ numbers, so I would use it occasionally.

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.

ICQ was my first interaction with computers proper as a kid. My father had just started as a programmer; and the family just got a computer with a Windows 95. Father sets up ICQ so that we can chat and send new year greetings, when he is away fro business. Good times.

It was way ahead of its time even in the 90s. I remember being swooned by the real-time typing windows, amazing sound effects, Just Works™ file transfer, and the wonderful contact list with people decorating their names with ASCII art. I made some wonderful friends in real life.

I seek you. This was the first internet messenger I ever used. I met some people playing quake on one of the few servers I could get below 200 ping on. Netman, and BayardBrightBlade, if you're still out there, thank you for an excellent 8th grade.

This is a thread to ask: are there any good/working tools to process the old databases from ICQ 99/2000 versions? Maybe even the Mac version? I have some old backups I'm sure have ICQ DBs on them and it would be cool to dump the contents.

I don't even remember what my ICQ number was. It was the first social network I joined.

My brain doesn't remember much, but i remember my handle; 376930 - from those early days of whining modems and the sheer excitement of talking to people from all over the world. As a kid it opened up my entire world.

22239414

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 :)

ICQ was probably my first instant messaging. Even before I found IRC.

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.

Am I the only one who was shocked to see this still exists? Honestly I thought it was shutdown a long time ago. It does bring back very fond memories, however.

I assumed it was already dead, just on a lark I went to sign in and it appears to require a phone number now, not my old number? so I guess it has not actually been "ICQ" in a while?

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

Oh, I didn’t even know it was still running. I’d used it when it was latched. Don’t even re my number, but I have very fond memories of using it.

ICQ was the best IM to ever exist. It was - at least here - pitifully killed by MSN, a much worse tool that had the advantage to be included in Windows.

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.

My account was taken over with one of the hacks, I remember shaming the person who took it into giving it back to me. 756331 signing off

Not only is this sad, it makes me feel old. Its just another reminder that the Internet of the late 90s/early 2000s is dead and not coming back. Instead its been replaced with corporate blandness and faux outrage.

Whatever the oldest age you could set on ICQ, I did and dialed it back a few days to make it believable. They had a directory you could sort by age and I was in third or fourth place. At 18 I was getting “are you really 102?” messages all the time. 90s girls were surprisingly eager to send nudes as I quickly learned. I miss it.

So, I found a grey t-shirt at a thrift store in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. It has a professionally embroidered ICQ logo on it.

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?

I wish they would just open source it, now that it's going to be stopped. Would love to self-host it a bit, just for nostagia

Fond memories of spending time late into the early morning hours chatting with friends and meeting new people during summer break. Even had a short UIN!

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.

When my best friend took his live in 2007, I backed up our whole ICQ chat history. Nearly 350000 messages. From time to time I read parts of our texts and it instantly brings me back to our teenage years. We shared everything via ICQ, it reads like a detailed log of our friendship.

Thank you for preserving these memories, ICQ.

293691201 - am logged in over pidgin right now^^ still works although nobody of my 187 contacts is online. Miss the times

101211975

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

2558361. Uh-oh. It feels weird how my ICQ UID has stuck to my head although so well. Just tested the online version and it was funny to see the contact names. Too bad the messages were not there. I think I have the db from old old pc somewhere, perhaps it is time to try installing it one more time.

I remember there was one level of Notpr0n¹ that required looking for an ICQ UIN. I guess new players won't be able to pass it without looking for the answer somewhere else.

¹ http://notpron.com/notpron/

263334

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.

I actually did a homemade uh-oh for one of my things as an homage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PsNkVAjoGQ

Sad to see it go even if I haven't used it since a 5 digit handle meant something.

I went on a few dates by randomly messaging people with girl-sounding names in the city I lived in. It took some work, but way less than getting to a night club. I'd always do that before visiting a new city... And sometimes had a date lined up by the time I arrived.

Gadu Gadu, the contemporary clone from Poland, is still up. I don't know if anyone uses it.

Fond memories of uni, standing in front of a dorm with dozens of students using ICQ inside. Sounds as if someone had just unloaded a truckload of Teletubbies in the yard, "Uh-Oh"'s coming from every direction in a hilarious cacophony.

I wonder how many others instantly recalled the ICQ notification sound on reading the headline.

127545907

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.

I never used ICQ but I have listened to this song on repeat since 2007 https://youtu.be/xVdMiHmnf_I?si=5rwC12kLsNZ0u7ON&t=74

I was never really a fan of ICQ even back in the early days of my teenage years when it was big. I just never saw it's appeal. That said

> You can chat with friends in VK Messenger and with colleagues in VK WorkSpace

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell no

Me’mries… lalala… mem’ries…

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.

1307615

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.

I think I still remember my ICQ #: 15868571

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!)

Oh man. It's the end of an era. I still have my ICQ number for 1998 memorized (62125812). I was a bit late the the internet game, ICQ was the first real platform where I met people who, still to this day, I consider friends.

Goodbye world! So long! It was a memorable one... Since 20+ year! It'll live on in my memories! Signing off for the one last time! ----------------------- -= 67804916 =- ==End of Transmission== -----------------------

End of an era. When I was a little kid ICQ was my first messaging program. It was the first time I spoke to someone over the computer. Even though I have not used it in a long time it gives me feelings of nostalgia.

Bummer. End of an era for sure. But it's dying even back then 20 years ago.

Sometime in 1997 ICQ banned underage users due to some legal issue they perceived. I changed my age on my account to see what would happen, and got banned, no way to recover.

I miss the little sounds it made, "hoot Hoot"

Man, loved ICQ. I used to text chat to the early hours with this Greek girl I met online. It was platonic but we got quite close and exchange physical letters and actually met up a couple of times. Good times.

6447137

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.

Goodbye from 145993830. How do I even remember this after so many years?

A piece of software that was way ahead of its time. Respect to Mirabilis

My first thought upon reading this was just to wonder if my account is still somehow active.

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.

#275727

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.

Great example of a terrible way to explain things to people:

"VK Messenger"

I'd guess most people going to the website would have no idea what VK Messenger is.

Ahh the good old days of multiprotocol Trillian rather than adware.

ICQ still WORKED? Wow.

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.

Low 6 digits owner. Have long lost access... Made many friends on ICQ. But all good things come to an end.

Though this one actually outlasted my expectations: AOL owned... But why does it mention VK?

It's been dead a long time, it just had a brief afterlife in Russia.

Chat apps aren't cheap like the old days, now they require a large moderation staff. Maybe AI will change that?

It’s been over 20 years since I used it, but I still remember my ICQ number by heart. It’s burned in there so deep I can recall it more quickly than my kid’s birthday.

RIP

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!

Has anyone made a patch or proxy to keep this alive by redirecting the client to their own rogue server? Could entice me to reinstall the software and come back.

I'm 467533, managed to remember my password -- haven't used ICQ in >20 years. I'll pop online periodically from now until the shut down. Say hi!

Wow, one of the last vestiges of the original WWW going away.

Wow, after all this time I thought everything was gone. But sure enough, my login for worked and they are all there, all my contacts. Farewell from 252972013

Haven't touched it in over 20 years, and kind of surprised ICQ was even still around, but so many memories from the '90s. Good night, sweet prince.

-- 10923345

So many good memories from those old days. I still remember my ICQ number even though I have not used it for so many years. R.I.P. ICQ!

I still remember my uin and password.

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.

The last bastion of the old Internet, end of an era!

The end of an era, to be sure. 16126427, joined in 1997.

So many relationships had across that IM client. Store-and-forward was the clutch feature.

My PIN for most of my devices is my ICQ number from decades ago.

Sad to hear it's shutting down, but I didn't even know it still existed.

I signed up for it to complete my config of Trillian, which I thought was totally amazing at the time. Too much sad computing nostalgia :(

243121

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 after IRC, there was ICQ and MSN. On ICQ, you had a number. ICQ was great. I have fond memories of the spinning flower.

28072048 here.

Anyone knows about NINA chat? They're trying to keep MSN, AIM, ICQ and others alive. I wonder if someone else is using it?

2174769 I still have my UIN memorized what... 25 years later? Sad to see it go even though I left the platform ages ago.

Wait, ICQ has been working?! BTW I still remember my ICQ number although I haven't used this messenger in many years.

I even remembered my password as well. I found a few really old friends that I have lost touch for decades still online.

I didn't even know it was still working

I can't remember what I did yesterday but I will remember my ICQ number until the day I die.

RIP to an absolute legend.

I sill clearly remember my 9 digit ID, despite haven’t logged in for years.

I used icq a lot for personal and work communication

spooky, only last month I was trying to recover my password, oh for those simpler days on the internet. 36063000

Wow, didn't realize it was still out there! Lots of fun chatting with random people from around the world on there.

15574041

10902983 sez bye, too. I lost the account cos this genius right here chose a male first name as the password.

I just logged in with my 20 year old password. I see many contacts that I no longer keep in touch. Uh oh!

Funny how ICQ drained people from IRC back then, but IRC is still there while ICQ will be forgotten.

Oh no, since like 1998 I had been using this, though not really for the past 10 years heh. Good bye friend!

TIL; icq still exists. Good memories.

Good old times playing those games with strangers and exchanging pictures, then after ICQ we used Skype.

The old internet was such a frontier.

While we've undoubtedly gained so much, we did lose something very special.

The status change and signaling by ICQ is something I wish other instant messaging did more.

I remember setting up a TTS system to announce the names of my friends as they came online.

“Fledermaus is online”

If I've never used ICQ before, can anyone tell me how it differed from other chat apps?

I will never forget my 5 digit ICQ number and how cool it made me feel in the early 2000s

I met my wife on ICQ back in 1998. End of an era. Thank you for the life changing software.

I remember coding im_kit on BeOS and chatting along over ICQ, AIM and others. Happy days!

Good old 20854206. Can’t believe I managed to log back in just now. Nothing there though.

Can't remember my driver's license number but will never forget 13658022. RIP

End of an era. One of the first IM apps I used in my early days of the internet.

I still have my icq number memorized and I think I always will

It has been years since they let me use my ultra short ICQ number from the 1990s.

See ya'!

194194984

Terrible, terrible news. So many events in my life are linked to ICQ...

Do we have a chance to save it?

I might or might not use part of my UIN as a salt in some passwords...

End of an error. I mean Era.

Noooo! Not ICQ! I only haven't used it for 20 years! But it was kinda cool, like AIM. Except why was their sound always "oh-OH?" And why was it called "ICQ"? I heard it was short for "i seek u" but that's kinda dumb, ain't it? innit?

1327344!

That’s the end then. 2455876 signing off ;) I even remember my password.

I can still remember my ICQ number by heart, but have no access to it.

everyone knows ICQ comes from "I seek you" right?

Hm, I dont' remember it now, it was over 20 years old :).

2854684

Not an elite 6 number UIN, but at least on the bottom side of 7 digits.

3383011 – I still remember my ICQ number 20+ years later :)

I remember my UIN but not password. Weird how that works!

Goodbye from 6605455.

Goodbye from 281436455, registered in ~2005.

555655 :)

I wish internet didn't evolve. mIRC and ICQ were magical.

4089460. No idea why that number is stuck in my brain.

An era ends. Still remembering my number. 9 digits!

Talking to my 24 y-o daughter:

- Have you ever heard of ICQ? - No

116633 Good times!

490202 signing off

So long, and thanks for all the fish. -85907003

Ultima Online plus ICQ, those were the days

Many good memories... Goodbye from 99184387

Anyone know what ever happened to Odigo?

This still exists?? What year is it?! :D

Oh-oh!

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

I thought ICQ died with AIM, darn.

An end of an era. I'm sad.

I met my first girlfriend on icq

1824942

not used in years but very good memories!

2476319, got it in 1997 or 1998

As a 5-digit user - uh oh!

ICQ later.

RIP ICQ

Spent a lot of my childhood using it.

Whoa it was still going??

21863839

Yup... still remember it! Crazy!

Sad to see this go.

Damn, icq, the memories.

Anybody remember Odigo?

677808. RIP old friend.

It was still working?

Goodbye from 9,275,290

Seems to be offline.

Muscle memory, do your stuff!

43411944

Goodbye from 7478741

Finaly! Great news!

Bye bye WarSheeps

so its owned by VK now ? how did that happen

52276034 here :)

86886958 add me

End of an era.

Good old days

664427 - RIP

And yet Gadu-Gadu, its Polish clone, is chugging along after its userbase has been decimated by Facebook Messenger (WhatsApp did not take over the market as much as in the other EU countries).

see you, space cowboy - 1179666

Uhoh!

Oh ho!

UHOH!

#14401370

8335393

A oh!

94280666

54443480

420702

Thank you ICQ!

15203830

91245402

see you on the flip side

lol, still remember my icq number by heart: 5479339

I wonder how many machine operates it and if there's a GDPR 'backup your data' feature hehe

Obligatory - but fully meant- "but can't (somebody) open source the server and keep it running?" comment.-

hit me up, 3080031

Can any of you billionaires save this?

Holy shit, ICQ is still around? I assumed it died 20 years ago.

ut-oh!

259804 - Now I kind of want to see if I can still log in.

"You cannot recover the password" :-(

uh oh :(

I haven't used ICQ in years, but my heart is still sad to receive this news.

"Uh oh"

Uh oh!

IRC buries yet another contender. This one has hung on longer than most.

Uh ow

Uh oh!

uh oh!

uh-oh!

uh-ow!

uh-oh!

uhh-ohh!

uh oh!

IRC will never die

Finally. It's been an FSB spying frontend for years anyway.

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