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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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All chat platforms (that I can remember) that were popular around that time used proprietary protocols, including ICQ. Everyone I knew preferred third-party clients to the official one, and these clients would sometimes break because ICQ kept changing tiny details in the protocol to try to force users to use the official client. It never worked, of course, because updates that fixed compatibility would usually come within a couple of hours.

I guess not open open, but at least they weren't behind cryptographic walls.

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."

> mostly just Russians wanting to practice their English

I guess that explains their recommendation of VK Messenger as a replacement.

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> Originally developed by the Israeli company Mirabilis in 1996, the client was bought by AOL in 1998, and then by Mail.Ru Group (now VK) in 2010.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ

I remember I paid $600 or so to Mirabilis around 1996 to buy their http server library to save the development time.

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