[HN Gopher] ICQ will stop working from June 26
___________________________________________________________________
ICQ will stop working from June 26
Author : Uncle_Sam
Score : 693 points
Date : 2024-05-24 16:16 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (icq.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (icq.com)
| Legion wrote:
| Goodbye from 6605455.
| kstrauser wrote:
| See ya.
|
| - 1939647
| danyadanch wrote:
| gg. 466368349
| patcon wrote:
| Farewell, ICQ.
|
| Sincerely, 1339782
| qiller wrote:
| See ya from 54198743. Weird how I remember this one better than
| any of my phone numbers
| robin_reala wrote:
| I probably won't install the suggested replacement of VK
| Messenger, I have to say. No more 71966195.
| jaredsohn wrote:
| same for 6141850 although it wouldn't work when I tried to log
| in like 5 years ago.
|
| Imagine a world where all apps had numeric user ids and people
| memorized them.
|
| Here's the ICQ song:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va8dnGF3Xyw
| epolanski wrote:
| 251437659, still remember my number even though I haven't been
| using ICQ for more than two decades.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Funny how we remember some numbers our entire lives, despite
| never using them. I can still rattle off my ICQ number, last
| used nearly 25 years ago, my compuserve ID which I left in
| 1998, my phone number as a kid, last used about 1994.
|
| I also remember various license plates my family had in the
| mid 90s, but I struggle to remember my own license plate
| number now. The only two phone numbers I know are mine and my
| wife's. I can still remember my high school's phone number
| though - for some really odd reason as I can't have phoned it
| much.
| vidarh wrote:
| When I was 7, my dad wrote a "game" in BASIC on the
| Commodore 64, and one section required a "secret" (you
| could see it if you listed the program...) code to gain
| access. The code was 32744. I have not used that game for
| more than 40 years, but it'll probably be one of the last
| things I remember...
|
| > I can still remember my high school's phone number though
| - for some really odd reason as I can't have phoned it
| much.
|
| Any chance it was a number your parents made you learn, or
| on a phone list next to / on the phone?
| epolanski wrote:
| I think that the reason why I remember it vividly is
| because I used it for logging in for years.
| ctvo wrote:
| 7289581
| cyberax wrote:
| 7106568
|
| How the hell I keep remembering it?!? I haven't used ICQ for
| more than 15 years?
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Maybe repetition works surprisingly well.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| uh oh :(
|
| I haven't used ICQ in years, but my heart is still sad to receive
| this news.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| IRC will never die
| jsheard wrote:
| Being self-hostable it can never die completely but lets face
| it, in most communities it's a hollowed out husk of what it
| used to be since Discord took off.
| maxbond wrote:
| My reading (and maybe I'm wrong because the comment was
| terse) is that IRC will never die, because it is not a
| commercial interest that can be shuttered. It's an open
| protocol and anyone can spin up a server.
|
| Any community you build inside a walled garden can be taken
| from you. I do think that is important to keep in mind.
| ta1243 wrote:
| It can't die because of that, but the reason we use things
| like reddit and discord and slack is because those are not
| open protocols -- they have monied interests behind getting
| people to use them
|
| The idealism of the internet in the 80s and 90s never could
| survive past the growth phase.
| z0r wrote:
| I don't use reddit, discord and slack because they are
| not open protocols. I use them because of the network
| effect and only reluctantly. Look at the relatively
| recent success of software like bittorrent and know that
| idealism and commercialism both live and die by the
| network effect. We aren't doomed to live in walled
| gardens forever.
| maxbond wrote:
| I think you can credit a win to IRC recently, too, when
| someone tried to buy control of Freenode and it seems (as
| least as an onlooker) that everyone successfully
| coordinated upping stakes and moving to a new network. I
| don't use IRC, but I find that impressive.
| maxbond wrote:
| I think everything you said was true, but I would point
| out that I think of this as a practical rather than
| ideological position. I'm not saying it never makes sense
| to build inside of a walled garden, I'm saying there is a
| costly tradeoff. I would speculate that it might be more
| important going forward, but time will tell.
| mog_dev wrote:
| Matrix too
| rocky1138 wrote:
| DOS Game Club on AfterNET is still really active, for those
| who have an interest in checking it out.
| vundercind wrote:
| And yet, it'll still be around after Discord shuts down.
| jsheard wrote:
| But would IRC be what a post-Discord exodus actually goes
| back to? Lacking basic modern amenities like seamless
| scrollback and push notifications is going to be a hard
| sell for the generation that grew up with Discord. As a
| sibling mentioned, Matrix is closer to the mark.
| jan_Sate wrote:
| Doesn't matter. IRC serves a niche that there's always a
| community for that no matter how small it'd become. I'd
| place a bet that it won't die as long as there's computer
| and internet. Long live IRC.
| toastal wrote:
| v3 has a lot of features folks don't talk about. But XMPP
| MUCs are still kicking too.
| timeon wrote:
| There is also Zulip, that I think is opensource.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Discord's main "ease of use" features: Centralized user
| management, centralized server discovery, server hosting
|
| What it does technically could be replicated by current
| technologies.
|
| Emojis, video streaming, screen streaming.
|
| Discoverability by the masses is a tough problem to solve
| because there is really no way to monetize it. Does Discord
| just rely on Nitro subscriptions?
| nerdponx wrote:
| > Discoverability by the masses is a tough problem to solve
| because there is really no way to monetize it. Does Discord
| just rely on Nitro subscriptions?
|
| It's a gold mine of data for things like market research,
| ad targeting/fingerprinting, and more recently AI training.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| Yes, but in the same way that WordStar still has some loyal
| users.
| dewey wrote:
| A few weeks ago I shut down my self hosted znc bouncer that I
| still logged in every few weeks to download logs, see if I got
| pinged somewhere and catch up with some low traffic channels.
|
| I then switched over to https://www.irccloud.com and it's such
| a improvement as I can use it on my phone, now I'm pretty
| active again and I kinda missed it.
| huxflux wrote:
| Are there any self-hosted alternatives?
| dewey wrote:
| For IRC bouncers there's many, but I'm not aware of
| anything that has a web interface, phone app, push
| notifications and all kept in sync. The market is pretty
| small.
|
| Alternatively there's many bridges these days so you can
| use Matrix with one of the many apps supported.
| progval wrote:
| > I'm not aware of anything that has a web interface,
| phone app, push notifications and all kept in sync.
|
| IRCCloud does. Or if you want an open source stack: Soju
| as bouncer, Gamja as web interface, and Goguma as Android
| app. If you have a paid Sourcehut account you get
| Soju+Gamja hosted for you at https://chat.sr.ht/ .
|
| I'm not sure The Lounge and Quassel support push
| notifications, but they otherwise fit your requirements.
| dewey wrote:
| > IRCCloud does.
|
| You replied to my post where I said I switched to
| IRCCloud and the person asked for self hosted
| alternatives to it :P
| progval wrote:
| Haha, yes, my initial message didn't mention it; then I
| re-read it and thought "huh I forgot to mention IRCCloud"
| before adding it.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I haven't used it, but Quassel looks like a similar idea.
|
| Alternatively using a Soju[1] with Goguma[2] for phone and
| Gamja[3] for web could work; FWIW, I use Soju, but not the
| other two.
|
| 1: https://sr.ht/~emersion/soju/
|
| 2: https://sr.ht/~emersion/goguma/
|
| 3: https://sr.ht/~emersion/gamja/
| kstrauser wrote:
| I didn't realize it still did. Wow, such memories.
| xeckr wrote:
| I don't even remember what my ICQ number was. It was the first
| social network I joined.
| vaylian wrote:
| why should ICQ be a social network?
| halfdan wrote:
| In the purest sense of those two words it was a social way to
| interact with a network of people?
| vaylian wrote:
| That's very fuzzy. What about e-mail? Or the phone network?
| Or the internet in general? Yes, there can be some social
| aspects to it. But that by itself does not make it into a
| social network.
|
| Networks have topologies and paths. The social graph
| matters on facebook because you get connected to your
| friend's friends which is a core feature of the platform.
| This is not the case with chat platforms.
| mattl wrote:
| What makes you think it wasn't a social network?
| vaylian wrote:
| It is only a chat platform and it predates the first social
| networks (which were explicitly called "social networks"
| back then). This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but I
| think people use the term "social network" way to much so
| that it doesn't even mean anything any more.
| mattl wrote:
| I don't know what the official ICQ client does today but
| back in the day it had more than just chats between
| people. It had file sharing, etc.
| eternauta3k wrote:
| We associate other stuff like sharing and virality with
| social networks. Isn't the phone network just as much of a
| social network as ICQ?
| mattl wrote:
| I think party lines on the phone, yes.
| Terr_ wrote:
| What qualities do you consider unique to a "social network"
| system (beyond its own self-marketing or the time-period in
| which it arose) that aren't qualities already present in ICQ,
| E-mail, IRC, newsgroups, etc?
| arp242 wrote:
| uh oh!
| tivert wrote:
| > 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?
| wildylion wrote:
| Absolutely yes. Damn, these times were something else.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| Kind of like WhatsApp vs iMessage, ICQ was more international
| than alternatives like AIM or MSN
| Scoundreller wrote:
| And dunno about AIM, but MSN took a looooong time to
| implement things like offline messaging. ICQ didn't (ever?)
| need the double coincidence of being online. Even iMessage
| and its fallback SMS today are bad for this.
|
| Fun MSN story: I read you could put curse words in your name
| subtitle if you used 0x ascii hex codes for one of the
| characters.
|
| So I pulled up the list of ascii codes and hoped that "beep"
| would work, but it did not make anyone beep. Then I tried
| null, and it made all my contacts go offline, and offline
| again as soon as they logged back in. Again and again. Except
| myself (can't remember if that was because I used a 3rd party
| client aMSN) Hehe. Had people apologize to me for suddenly
| dropping mid convo.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Not from Russia, but pretty close in all senses of the word. It
| was heavily used in my circles up to about 2010-2011, then
| started losing market share to other messengers (one1 of the
| popular messengers was from the same company that now owns
| ICQ), and then Telegram came and buried it completely in no
| time at all.
|
| 1: https://agent.mail.ru
| grishka wrote:
| Russian here -- we used it until around 2011, which is when
| VKontakte introduced instant messages and soon after group
| chats, so everyone switched to that.
|
| Here's the announcement: https://vk.com/blog/blog131, the title
| "VKontakte in ICQ mode" is telling. Oh and the contest Pavel
| announced at the end of that post? I won that with my shoddy
| MFC app :P
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
| cultavix wrote:
| haha... this sounds so familiar ;)
| weinzierl wrote:
| 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.
| jan_Sate wrote:
| Unlike ICQ, mIRC is just an IRC client and even if it dies,
| the IRC networks would remain accessible using other IRC
| clients. That said it'd be a pity if mIRC dies.
| RankingMember wrote:
| I'd hope Khaled would open source it if he decides to give
| it up
| freedomben wrote:
| This is starting to feel even more important now that
| HexChat is over.[1]
|
| Is anyone aware of maintained forks or a revival effort?
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39326630
| okasaki wrote:
| IRC is very simple. I used to connect with telnet if a
| client wasn't available.
| nick238 wrote:
| Isn't mIRC just a client for IRC (a standard), but ICQ is
| centralized? Or are there some "mIRC"-branded servers out
| there that run popular IRC channels?
| aleksandrm wrote:
| Correct, mIRC is just one of many clients for an IRC
| protocol.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Yes, yes, just a client, but for me it was the first
| interface to whole new world, so I will never forget it.
| edm0nd wrote:
| _slaps you with a trout_
| alluro2 wrote:
| I genuinely LOLed, thanks for that! :) What a flashback.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| mIRC has the same chance of dying as Irssi. As in none.
| kirenida wrote:
| I remember choosing irrsi over bitchx because the latter
| was "too complicated" for me at the time.
| codegeek wrote:
| 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).
| Ma8ee wrote:
| I certainly ran into scammers on ICQ.
| codegeek wrote:
| Which year ?
| tempestn wrote:
| Yeah, the random chats were definitely the highlight. I
| recall a level of discourse considerably higher than what you
| commonly find on eg. Omegle now (or 5 years ago or whenever I
| last used it, anyway).
| dadver wrote:
| I don't know if it's nostalgia or silliness, but I've at
| various times reused the ICQ uh-oh audio as irssi
| hilight/putty audio bell sound, SMS signal and Discord voice
| channel join sound over the years. Usually I find it
| entertaining the first two or three times and then it acts as
| a very large stressor.
| blucaz wrote:
| Me too, it's been my phone's notification sound for about
| 20 years now
| 0xDEADFED5 wrote:
| 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
| lxgr wrote:
| 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/
| semi wrote:
| >(not sure if it was part of the "chat wars" [1] too).
|
| Kind of in that they were a good enough competitor that AOL
| bought them and AOL definitely continued to fight.
|
| I don't think they ever publicly integrated them but they did
| merge the back ends enough that for a while you could just
| login to AIM with an ICQ UID, and impress all your friends
| with your cool numeric aim account
| jmbwell wrote:
| Being reachable only from a PC at home... man. Now _that_ I
| miss. The whole lifestyle of having a clear distinction
| between being at the computer and not. Status messages for a
| time when "away" was a state of being you ever _were_. Coming
| back to see whether your crush had messaged you. Simpler
| times for sure.
|
| Before we even had "wi-fi!"
| 101008 wrote:
| I started writing an essay about this topic. I am one of
| those nostalgics by the old internet. I thought it was the
| aesthetic (geocities, etc), but after giving it a lot of
| thought, that wasn't. It was that your life (all of us) was
| "offline by default".
|
| We lived offline and then we connect to the internet for a
| few minutes, hours, whatever. But you lived your life
| offline. We attended concerts, took photos, recorded
| videos, and then we took our time to share them online
| (maybe that same night, maybe the next days). You went
| online to discuss something that happened in real life.
|
| Now it's the reverse. We live "online by default".
| Everything happens online, all we do is first online or at
| least at the same time. We attend a concert? We publish
| pictures and videos almost instantly (some people even do a
| live stream from the concert!). Something happens in
| politics? People discuss it as it happens on Twitter,
| Facebook, etc.
|
| Going to the computer to connect to surf the web may sound
| silly, but that was the difference. Internet was inside a
| device you had to use. Now internet is happening around you
| all the time (and if you miss it for a few days, ouch!)
| lxgr wrote:
| The Internet being an opt-in thing that you'd consciously
| connect to at a set our of the day, not something that
| would reach out to you and notify you about all kinds of
| things at random times, was definitely a different
| feeling.
|
| Back then, it felt like a parallel world; now it's more
| like an overlay on this one.
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| I guess AI is the next thing that's still opt-in now,
| will be opt-out tomorrow and then no-escape. It would be
| interesting to read a nostalgic thread from 2070...
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| That's life isn't it? Mailing addresses, electricity,
| car-based transportation in the US, technologies and
| cultural institutions change and create worlds dependent
| on them to function. There was probably a time when the
| very idea that you stayed up after the sun set was seen
| as a silly modern affliction and indeed for most of human
| prehistory humans did not have access to artificial
| lighting. Now there are people, like me, who consider
| themselves as night owls.
| aembleton wrote:
| > We attend a concert? We publish pictures and videos
| almost instantly
|
| Switch to a data plan with less than 2GB of data per
| month and you'll be a lot more thoughtfull about how much
| you post instantly. You may still post it but you'll do
| it when you get home; just like the old days.
| fragmede wrote:
| you reminded me that we used to pay for Internet access
| by the hour. You'd pay $X for one hour of Internet use,
| so you'd go online, do a thing and then disconnect to
| save money. local vs remote for email was such a
| different time. you'd have a fat client on your laptop,
| and you'd do a bunch of writing offline, before
| connecting, having the program sync, and then disconnect.
|
| how times have changed!
| nogridbag wrote:
| I still feel bad I left my parents' computer online all
| night to download a .wav (?) audio file of Mario jumping
| from Nintendo.com. Back then, the closest most kids got
| to Nintendo was via video game magazines. So going to
| Nintendo.com for the first time and downloading an audio
| file was a special moment. The download was taking hours
| and I have no idea how much it cost my parents. I just
| remember being so disappointed the next day when it
| turned out to only be a 1 second audio file. THAT WAS
| IT?!?! I WAITED ALL THAT TIME FOR THAT? :)
| jraph wrote:
| Wait, it didn't take an entire night to download a 1 sec
| wav (assuming the worst) file, did it?
|
| 1 sec of wav would be 176.4 kB (assuming 44.1 kHz, 16
| bits, stereo), or 176.4 * 1024 * 8 bits. That divided by
| 28800 bits/s (assuming a 28k modem) gives 50.1 seconds.
|
| A 96 kHz 32 bit stereo wav would be 768 kB, 4-5 times
| that so still less than 5 minutes.
|
| What am I missing?
| nogridbag wrote:
| This was a very long time ago, so I don't remember all
| details. But yes the download took hours. This was
| basically the first website I visited when I got internet
| access (and I would assume most kids did as well). So
| this predates 28.8 modems. I believe I had a 14.4 modem,
| was out in the country, and websites were not stable.
| This is somewhat of a core memory for me, so I do
| remember some details clearly.
|
| Simply going to Nintendo.com took a very long time. Lots
| of us regular users started coming online for the first
| time and likely overloaded their servers. Navigating to
| the section of the website where it listed audio files to
| download was a whole endeavor of itself. It took multiple
| attempts to download that dang jumping sound. I would
| leave it running during the day and when I came back
| later, the download would have randomly timed out. And I
| think at least once my parents picked up one of phones in
| the house and messed it up. I believe as a kid I quickly
| learned that the web was faster at night time when less
| people were online. So after several failed attempts, I
| started it at night time and woke up to it completed. Not
| sure if you were online at that time, but I don't think
| you can simply reduce this to math equation.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| I used internet so much via dialup my ISP emailed me
| saying I need to go on a business plan. Surprising for a
| 15 year old.
| mike_hock wrote:
| You also had digital freedom and autonomy. You controlled
| how many ICQ accounts you had. Setting one up took a
| minute and cost nothing.
|
| You chose the client you used to connect with. Noobs used
| the official ICQ adware and you used some 1337 open
| source client on Linux that could handle both ICQ and
| Jabber. But you could talk to them on the same platform.
|
| Where are the alternative WhatsApp clients? Or iMessage?
| Or Telegram? You can't talk to anyone anymore unless you
| submit to one of a few megacorps and run their software.
| mfuzzey wrote:
| Telegram has plenty of alternative clients. The others
| probably don't
| behringer wrote:
| Element is where it's at.
| jedberg wrote:
| I miss Adium. All my chats in one place. Beeper is trying
| to replicate that.
|
| https://www.beeper.com
| 0xedd wrote:
| Get a dumb phone or a Linux phone. Stop complaining. Be
| an example.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Or just don't take your phone out? I always read these
| threads and think that the folks here probably have
| issues disconnecting and so they're longing for a world
| where social pressures forced disconnection. I still
| frequently don't check my socials until after work or
| after a long social activity. I'm upfront with my
| contacts about that too, and most of my friends are like
| me. I only monitor my phone constantly if I'm awaiting an
| important call or email, but then I usually have
| something big going on in my life at the time.
| 101008 wrote:
| I am not complaining about myself, but how society
| behaves. Yes I can do it, but it doesn't mean the rest
| will follow me.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Does it matter? Was society behaving like you in other
| ways back then? I'm younger than the set here but not
| young certainly, and I distinctly remember how lonely it
| was to be a nerd in the '90s. I've assumed through most
| of my life that the most you can do is control how you
| and your circle behave. My circle varies on the
| introversion/extroversion scale where I'm in the middle
| and roughly get back to comms within a day, my more
| introverted friends may take multiple days, and have
| extroverted friends who get back within hours or even
| minutes. My partner is on the extroverted side and is
| constantly monitoring her comms but before the smartphone
| she had a rich rolodex of contacts who she was constantly
| calling.
| hoyd wrote:
| Is the essay somewhere online?
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| I've been pondering library box and pirate box kind of
| setups as well as mesh networks. I've never used any of
| that but the idea of having a separate network bound to a
| location seems rather interesting (be it in a kind of
| pokemon go kind of way)
|
| You get a new flavor of privacy, no moaning about
| copyright, no nonsensical political correctness, much
| less need for security, people you can do things with irl
| and possibly very high bandwidth use or cpu intensive
| applications. It might even have limited time service
| like say outside office hours.
|
| We use to have a popular forum around here ran by a pub.
| It became to much work to maintain and the owner wasn't
| interested enough. It was suppose to be for regular
| visitors.
|
| If it was only accessible locally and on its own wifi
| network you set it up once and it would work just fine.
| Not having access to the darts competition from home is a
| feature not a drawback.
| rkagerer wrote:
| I love how you could set different Away statuses for
| distinct individuals / groups.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| Dad picking up the phone while I was connected to my ISP
| via the 14.4kb modulater/demodulator and ruining my chat
| session. What a monster.
| toast0 wrote:
| > didn't support offline messages
|
| ICQ _did_ support offline messages, from the beginning afaik,
| too. I had a 6-digit uin (485358 or something similar), until
| it got banned for running a bot (whoops).
|
| To the sibling reply, I think AIM and ICQ did have interop on
| messages at some point, it was much later than when ICQ moved
| protocols to OSCAR and TOK though.
| lxgr wrote:
| Oh, did I mix it up with MSN then, or maybe early Skype? Or
| did this possibly happen after the OSCAR migration?
|
| I vividly remember being amazed by offline delivery in
| Jabber, so at least one of ICQ or MSN must have not had it
| for me to even notice.
| toast0 wrote:
| I can't remember, but I don't think MSN had offline
| messages. And I don't think ICQ lost offline messaging in
| the OSCAR transition, IIRC, ICQ moved to OSCAR with
| offline messages, then AIM got them, then AIM and ICQ
| could talk for a while (but all my ICQ contacts that I
| kept had moved to AIM or MSN by then anyway).
|
| As I recall, originally, the ICQ client polled the server
| via UDP to see if it had any messages, and then you would
| do peer to peer for online messaging. But when you logged
| in, you'd get a cascade of the offline messages (uh, uh,
| uh, uh-oh)
| lxgr wrote:
| Woah, ICQ had peer-to-peer? I thought it was quite
| centralized! Was that before the OSCAR migration?
|
| I only remember Skype being "true" peer-to-peer, with
| your PC randomly becoming a presence/call relaying
| "supernode" if you had a publicly reachable IP and good
| connectivity. Different times!
| toast0 wrote:
| Yeah, ICQ was peer to peer for online messaging as I
| recall in the say 97-99 timeframe. I think Yahoo was too.
| They'd fall back to server message passing, of course.
|
| But this was just for messaging (and file transfer), not
| for presence/buddy list which was all server driven.
|
| In that time frame, few had firewalls or NAT or two
| computers at the same location, so (server mediated) peer
| to peer just worked unless you were on a corporate
| network.
| xp84 wrote:
| Circa 2000 or so, when AIM, MSN, Yahoo! and ICQ were all
| flourishing, Yahoo had already added offline messages.
| ICQ, I think also had them, though it was probably
| configurable, I recall the client having a half dozen
| screens of options. At that moment, neither MSN nor AIM
| had it yet. AIM eventually did add it, though I don't
| recall if it was added to AIM after ICQ de-merged from
| the AIM backend.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Then something like trillian to glue them all together.
| lxgr wrote:
| There was also Meebo, which allowed you to login to all
| of them via a web interface (which I believe none of the
| messengers had natively) without installing the
| respective clients!
| toast0 wrote:
| AOL had 'AOL Quick Buddy', a Java applet client and later
| AIM Express that used Adobe Flash.
|
| I definitely used quick buddy from computers at my junior
| college (98-2000), but I don't remember using AIM
| express.
| kergonath wrote:
| Adium! It really was a gem of an app. Much better than
| any other I'd used at the time (or that I have used
| since, actually).
| knorker wrote:
| It was MSN. I remember when MSN arrived late to the game,
| and managed to get users anyway, despite not having such
| an obvious feature, that the incumbent had.
| grishka wrote:
| The "proper" way of using ICQ from your phone was Jimm, an
| unofficial Java client. I was _the cool kid_ with a patched
| Siemens phone, which could run native apps, so I used
| NatICQ.elf instead.
| lxgr wrote:
| Haha, what Siemens phone could you patch to run native apps
| on? I must have switched to Nokia/Symbian before that
| became a thing. (That could run both native S60 and J2ME
| apps - basically infinite apps and games!)
| grishka wrote:
| The x65-x75 series ones, aka the "SGold" platform. I
| still have my CX75. That ELF loader patch was, without
| doubt, a pinnacle of patch engineering.
|
| My _next_ phone was a Nokia 5800, one of the last Symbian
| ones.
| xp84 wrote:
| Your phone experience reminds me of how, at about age 18, I
| coveted a Sidekick so much. I knew that it had AIM built-in.
| Since SMS was too expensive for me to consider a replacement
| for instant messaging, this seemed to me like the holy grail
| of teen socializing. To be able to use AIM anytime,
| anywhere...I could only imagine how cool it would be,
| especially if all my friends had it too.
|
| I finally got something exactly like that in 2008 (both with
| mobile AIM clients, and as SMS and iMessage steadily overtook
| AIM for the purposes we used IM for), but it strikes me as
| poignant that as an adult, it wasn't really as meaningful to
| me as it would have been as a teen.
|
| I guess what I'm saying is actually, I kind of get why the
| gen-z kids became so terminally online. I would have availed
| myself of the ability to socialize, privately, nonstop day
| and night!
| dunham wrote:
| Decades ago there was encryption that one of those clients
| (maybe pidgin) layered on top of AIM. It used 128-bit
| blowfish for the cipher, but the key was negotiated with
| 128-bit diffie hellman, which killed the security.
|
| I started to implement the number field sieve to demonstrate
| this, but got lost in the weeds and moved on to other stuff.
| shmoe wrote:
| I was ICQ'ing my buds from a Motorola Talkabout 2-way pager
| for a bit there :) Memories...
| larodi wrote:
| 4125222
|
| I still remember it but not the pass
| verst wrote:
| 219431446 was me :D. No idea why I still remember that.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| 16575923
| silisili wrote:
| 22861316
|
| Tried to login a few years back to see if any of my old
| Quake buddies happened to still use it, but couldn't.
| Support said unless I had the recovery email still, which
| was at bigfoot.com which has been dead for decades, I was
| out of luck.
| kinow wrote:
| Interesting, I managed to open the other IDs I found
| here, but yours gives me a very broken web page:
| https://icq.im/22861316/en
|
| I wonder if you had some ASCII characters, or those old
| custom-font-and-special-characters texts we used to use?
| silisili wrote:
| I'm not gonna lie, I have absolutely no idea. That's
| bizarre. What would normally show there?
| pain_perdu wrote:
| 500122
| recursive wrote:
| Pretty close to mine. 4367571. Must have registered a month
| apart.
| mdip wrote:
| I had 2589620 ... I have the password, somewhere. :)
| tky wrote:
| 383105.
|
| I can remember an unused IM account from a lifetime ago but
| not a single ffmpeg flag.
| nickjj wrote:
| I don't remember my ICQ number but I can remember a dozen
| F2P MMOs from the early / mid-2000s and most of my
| usernames but I need to look up `tar -xvzf` every time even
| with an awareness of the Arnold Schwarzenegger meme.
|
| The brain remembers what it wants to remember.
| kirenida wrote:
| Had to look up the meme, as I couldn't remember it. I
| think gentoo or slackware made me remeber -xvzf
| calmworm wrote:
| 666260
|
| Had it for many years then someone "hacked it" and took it.
| That was the end of it for me.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yeah I did not realize how much people like to have low
| number IDs. I signed up very early on but my friends bailed
| so I did too. No idea what even happened to that account
| and the email addresses I used at the time are also lost
| after being abandoned. Given average password
| sophistication at the time, I'm sure it got hacked/hijacked
| at some point.
| kinow wrote:
| Looks like your account has been deleted too
| https://icq.im/666260/en
| int_19h wrote:
| 141571088
|
| I find it amusing that I still remember this right off the
| bat despite not having used it for 15 years, but I don't
| remember my phone number from the same time period.
| humanfromearth9 wrote:
| I've kept the same phone number since 1998. Incidentally, I
| still remember my phone number from 26 years ago.
| kinow wrote:
| Looks like this account has been deleted
| https://icq.im/141571088/en
| anentropic wrote:
| 1747880
|
| it's crazy I can still remember this despite not having used
| it for maybe ...25 years?
| humanfromearth9 wrote:
| 42731249. I still remember this shit without any hesitation,
| incl. password. And have not used the service for 20 years
| either. And then, I continuously forget the name of
| colleagues I see at least every other day.
| iszomer wrote:
| 13686723.
|
| That feeling is mutual.
| xcv123 wrote:
| Same here. Haven't logged in for 20 years but I remembered
| the number.
| StrictDabbler wrote:
| 156876
|
| Just logged in, there's nothing left.
|
| I remember being so annoyed I hadn't signed up a few weeks
| earlier and gotten a 5-digit instead.
| kinow wrote:
| You should keep trying. Looks like your account was not
| deleted, but check if the name/description matches what you
| had the last you remember - https://icq.im/4125222/en
| jaredhallen wrote:
| Sounds like we signed up about the same time. 4051543.
| gdwrd wrote:
| I still remember mine--3337788. But then it was stolen, and
| that was almost the end of the ICQ era. Well, something
| comes, and something goes.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Hard to realise how cultural waves come and go. Humbling
| septune wrote:
| 5 digits ICQ number is a great achievement
| nogridbag wrote:
| 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.
| aembleton wrote:
| I tried messaging someone who seemed to be online and got a
| system reply telling me that my account had been compromised
| which is entirely possible as 20 years ago I used that same
| password elsewhere.
| amlib wrote:
| Thanks, I had no idea what my password was but trying one of
| the old ones I constantly used back in the day worked :)
|
| I also didn't remember my ICQ# but luckly I found it on a
| backup from an old website I used to have.
|
| There was also a page where me and my friends were trying to
| pool togheter our numbers and incentivize people to use it,
| back when ICQ was being demolished by MSN and AIM... it was a
| very grassroots attempt that ammounted to nothing lol, but oh
| whell, at least we tried :(
|
| You served me well 177024717
| fragmede wrote:
| I logged in (how the hell did I remember the ID and
| password!?) but all my contacts except 1 that I don't
| remember are gone.
| freediver wrote:
| Six digit UIN holder, last used 2009.
| wernercd wrote:
| I have a 7 digit number but I remember it still after all these
| years lol Was able to login still.
| robohydrate wrote:
| 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.
| geek_at wrote:
| same! 97910162 for some reason I even printed it out with a
| lable maker and put it on my safe.. it's not the password but
| might be a good diversion
| yatz wrote:
| 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!
| adamomada wrote:
| > 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
| torpid wrote:
| 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.
| kazmer_ak wrote:
| Man, that's how I felt about MSN Messenger and XFire and Google
| Talk...
| didip wrote:
| Bummer. End of an era for sure. But it's dying even back then 20
| years ago.
| bhouston wrote:
| I was an ICQ user but I haven't logged in since the early 2000s
| I would guess? I have a faint recollection of maybe using
| Trillium during its heyday with ICQ maybe in the 2003-2004 time
| period?
| anta40 wrote:
| Really? My impression was 2 decades ago it was pretty popular,
| at least lots of my high school mates used it.
|
| I never, and eventually picked YM instead few years later.
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| Goodbye from 201253
| focusedone wrote:
| Woah, that's a low number.
| to-boss wrote:
| there was a big market for short numbers back in the day. i
| remember buying a 6-digit icq number for a 10EUR paysafecard
| when i was like 14 in a "hacker" forum lol
| WA wrote:
| The hack was to scan ICQ numbers for their associated email
| addresses, filter by big providers like Hotmail and Yahoo
| and try to sign up for the same address. Some were
| abandoned and you could use the username again. Then
| password-reset in ICQ and voila, there's your 6-digit ICQ
| number.
|
| But yeah, I bought a 6 digit number on eBay for 5-10 bucks
| too ;)
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| I feel old now..
| StrictDabbler wrote:
| Appreciate it.
|
| Sincerely,
|
| 156876
| midnitewarrior wrote:
| uh oh!
| wildylion wrote:
| I really like it how they were still using exactly this uh-oh
| sound at least in some McDonald's restaurants in my area :)
| bhouston wrote:
| Goodbye from 9,275,290
| SSLy wrote:
| Gadu Gadu, the contemporary clone from Poland, is still up. I
| don't know if anyone uses it.
| pndy wrote:
| All my friends left it years ago and moved to either whatsapp
| or fb messenger, some opted for telegram. From what people
| wrote in appstore it seems that GG become some kind of social
| network filled with spam and scam profiles.
|
| I tried to log in by site right now and my password isn't
| recognized anymore; and it also seems to be loading something
| from tiktok there
| Nux wrote:
| 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!
| rocky1138 wrote:
| Goodbye from 7478741
| echelon wrote:
| The old internet was such a frontier.
|
| While we've undoubtedly gained so much, we did lose something
| very special.
| marban wrote:
| 490202 signing off
| Gigablah wrote:
| 402777 here!
| indianmouse wrote:
| 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==
| -----------------------
| jeffrom wrote:
| lol, still remember my icq number by heart: 5479339
| cultavix wrote:
| Oh no, since like 1998 I had been using this, though not really
| for the past 10 years heh. Good bye friend!
| vitaut wrote:
| Wait, ICQ has been working?! BTW I still remember my ICQ number
| although I haven't used this messenger in many years.
| josefresco wrote:
| 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!
| gnicholas wrote:
| Instant messengers were great -- better than texting and better
| than posting on FB/Twitter IMO. I loved away messages, which
| were ephemeral and not spammed to your network. We're getting a
| little of that functionality with iOS's DND status, but it's
| not customizable.
|
| My theory is that FB didn't want to enable away messages
| because then people would just set it once and not log in for a
| long time. It's a shame that a feature that was common 20 years
| ago is now only starting to make a comeback.
| ssfrr wrote:
| 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.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Likely the same reason I remember my grandparents (now passed)
| phone number. A handful of digits I saw or referenced a lot.
| jedberg wrote:
| > Was that actually the identifier we shared with people to
| connect?
|
| Yes. It was like giving out your telephone number.
| gruturo wrote:
| And that's also why we remember it. It's from a time we used
| to remember phone numbers (smartphones weren't around, in
| many countries even normal cell phones weren't widespread
| yet, and even those had limited memory and usually no way to
| migrate to a new phone (the SIM could store entries too but
| had laughably low capacity, like 25 entries with max 9
| letters for the contact name)).
|
| So, committing them to memory was just a thing. And our
| brains get less plastic with age. I can remember my home
| phone number from 1982, but not my last cell number (before
| the current one) although I used it for 3 years, as recently
| as 2014. The insane amount of information streaming in front
| of our senses probably also triggered some unconscious
| attitude adjustment (not going to bother remembering any of
| it, if it's important I'll write it down).
| sarnowski wrote:
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| I still remember the phone number I had from when I was
| 10-19, but I can't remember my sons or my mums phone numbers,
| or indeed any numbers I've had or used since I was 19 other
| than my current number that I got in my 30's. Basically, the
| moment I got my first cellphone in '95 or so, I stopped
| learning phone numbers, other than remembering my current
| number because I give it out regularly.
|
| But also, I think, because my parents drilled that old number
| into me, because remembering it was a "lifeline".
| phantom784 wrote:
| I made a point to memorize my wife's and my parents' cell
| numbers, just in case I'm ever in a situation where I don't
| have a phone and need to reach them (like if I got robbed
| or something).
| vidarh wrote:
| It's a sensible thing to do, but I have so many ways to
| get at online services where I can reach them that it
| hasn't felt pressing - if I'm in a situation where the
| only phone I can get hold of isn't a smartphone it sounds
| more like a 999 or nearest consulate kind of situation...
| But you're right it'd probably be worth doing anyway.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| So you get robbed (or something), and you're physically
| OK but have no phone and no wallet.
|
| You find a phone to use, however you do that, and dial
| the local emergency number (0118 999 881 999 119
| 725...3), and maybe they show up and take a report.
|
| And then they leave.
|
| Now, you're in the same situation you were in before (no
| phone, no wallet) -- nothing has really changed.
|
| What happens next? What's your next move?
| int_19h wrote:
| Strangely enough, I don't remember my phone number at that
| time, but I do remember my ICQ#
| anentropic wrote:
| It's weird that I can't remember my phone number from that
| time
|
| But the ICQ number has stuck with me
| jaredsohn wrote:
| 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.)
| fckgw wrote:
| 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.
| Jerrrrry wrote:
| >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.
| donatj wrote:
| 84369534
|
| I mean it was basically your phone number for chat. I'm sure
| many people remember their childhood phone number as well.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| 831364 but suffered an account takeover. ICQ shutting down
| mildly eases this long torment of losing the 6-digit account.
| calmworm wrote:
| Happened to me too. 666260
| agumonkey wrote:
| Hmm I only remembered it partially, but I see it was on old
| phpbb boards. That said, password is probably gone forever.
| timcobb wrote:
| 4007929... great question...!
| s0rce wrote:
| I remember mine, 15254346. Good question...
| nottorp wrote:
| > Was that actually the identifier we shared with people to
| connect?
|
| Yes, exactly.
| starik36 wrote:
| 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/
| antics9 wrote:
| 9507416
| inversetelecine wrote:
| Mine was easy to remember, so I did. Mostly repeating digits.
| 2288665
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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.
| clintfred wrote:
| 1657721. Yeah. Why _do_ I remember this 25+ years later. I
| guess you did have to tell someone else the number so they
| could find you. Maybe that 's it?
| barbazoo wrote:
| 889246**
|
| I forgot what I had for lunch yesterday but somehow I can
| remember my ICQ number.
| fullstop wrote:
| 3330*
|
| I'm going to miss it, even if it's not been used in decades.
| justsid wrote:
| 448 484 004. It was weirdly easy to remember and like everyone
| else here, almost 2 decades later I still remember it. I miss
| those simpler days, Discord makes it much easier to connect
| with larger groups of people these days but it just isn't the
| same magic. Or maybe it's all just rose coloured nostalgia
| glasses? Either way, it's pretty sad.
| walexander wrote:
| Yeah, kinda crazy.
|
| I didn't even remember ICQ had numbers until I read the first
| comment in this thread posting theirs and most of the number
| immediately popped into my head, 10238* (cant remember last
| two).
|
| Makes me wonder what other things in my brain are back in
| archive, just needing the right push to bring to surface.
| dark-star wrote:
| 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
| galdosdi wrote:
| I still remember the phone number of this girl I wanted to
| date in high school, 867-5309
| miscellanemone wrote:
| I tried to call but lost my nerve.
| tomashertus wrote:
| I still remember the number after 20+ years. Crazy.
| gruturo wrote:
| 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.
| dionidium wrote:
| https://icq.im/605080
| wildpeaks wrote:
| My number is so burnt into my memory, I'm only half-joking when
| I say that if I get Alzheimer, I'll recall it long after I
| forgot my own name.
| fullstop wrote:
| Mine was only six digits, and it was easy to remember since the
| first three were "333". I Can still sign in, but my contact
| list is empty and I have nobody to chat with.
| adamomada wrote:
| Isn't there some study which showed that the maximum length
| number someone can easily remember is around 7 digits? It's
| quite strange tho I remember it too, 3243845
| jes5199 wrote:
| 526450, I think
| ValentineC wrote:
| 20896111. (I think I had a shorter one that I deleted, back
| when I was trying it out for the first time, before I had
| online friends, and didn't know the value of length.)
|
| RIP, ICQ.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Finally. It's been an FSB spying frontend for years anyway.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| To spy on who? Why would the FSB use ICQ? Isn't it basically a
| completely dead platform?
| zillazills wrote:
| see you, space cowboy - 1179666
| e38383 wrote:
| That's the end then. 2455876 signing off ;) I even remember my
| password.
| mindcrime wrote:
| 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.
| layla5alive wrote:
| 1. What has happened to us that 16M people is something we just
| laugh at as an inconsequential number, wtf.
|
| 2. SNR on those 16M people is probably well above average in
| the vector of most interesting people on the planet.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Not 16M, 16. Very different.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Either the parent edited their post, or you misread it by 6
| orders of magnitude.
| danielbln wrote:
| 16, not 16M.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _What has happened to us that 16M people is something we just
| laugh at as an inconsequential number, wtf._
|
| I literally meant 16 total people. To be fair, that was a bit
| of hyperbole, but the point is that there probably aren't a
| lot of people looking to use an "open source ICQ alternative"
| in 2024.
|
| That doesn't mean that somebody shouldn't still do it, but it
| would probably be a passion project, more than something that
| would make money. At least that's my guess. :-)
| octernion wrote:
| perfect HN comment, no notes
| xp84 wrote:
| They've been working on other ones. You can set up an AIM
| server, too.
| mindcrime wrote:
| I have to admit, the thought has crossed my mind that it
| would be kinda cool to build a messaging server with support
| for ICQ protocol, MSN's protocol, OSCAR (AIM), Yahoo's
| protocol, etc. Maybe throw in XMPP too.
|
| And in reading up on OSCAR[1] just now, I only just found out
| that ICQ did use OCSAR as well (at least according to
| Wikipedia). I never knew that. I had always thought OSCAR was
| only used by AIM.
|
| Live and learn...
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSCAR_protocol
| lproven wrote:
| A team has reverse engineered MSN and launched their own
| MSN IM server:
|
| https://escargot.chat/
| mindcrime wrote:
| Righteous!
| lproven wrote:
| When the Russians bought ICQ from the dying AOL and relaunched
| it, the same protocol was still available and Pidgin worked.
| But they turned it off after a while, and what a shock,
| everyone left.
|
| I contacted the company, suggested they bridged it to other
| protocols, and pointed them at FOSS code that would let them do
| it. I got a snarky email back saying that what I proposed was
| impossible -- even though others had done it before. Idiots.
|
| -- 73187508
| Khaine wrote:
| 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.
| noncoml wrote:
| A piece of software that was way ahead of its time. Respect to
| Mirabilis
| carlos_rpn wrote:
| Goodbye from 145993830. How do I even remember this after so many
| years?
| kristiandupont wrote:
| 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 :-)
| inversetelecine wrote:
| Fun forgetting your speakers were cranked and getting a
| message. " Uh oh!" waking up the whole house.
| focusedone wrote:
| Wow, didn't realize it was still out there! Lots of fun chatting
| with random people from around the world on there.
|
| 15574041
| swozey wrote:
| 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
| 1327344 wrote:
| 1327344!
| debo_ wrote:
| All I can say is: "Uh oh!"
|
| https://youtu.be/RhGHerssyk4
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| LOL :-)
| inanutshellus wrote:
| I have the ICQ "Uh OH!" sound in rotation as a text message
| alert sound for work/support contacts.
|
| It's pretty jarring, as y'all know, so it doesn't do to have as
| the default sound, but it it's great for important contacts
| that don't message much.
|
| Honestly it's a bewildering choice for the default "message
| received" sound of an IM client. It's so very alarming. I can
| only guess that the makers were expecting you to be a room away
| from your tower PC (with its deluxe 18" CRT display and mouse
| cables that required a screwdriver) to make sure you never
| missed a message.
|
| These days, when you're never more than a layer of fabric away
| from your IM, it's a bit much. But man, effective.
| pndy wrote:
| Somehow I'm having Worms Armageddon flashbacks
| mike_hock wrote:
| Many moons have passed since the worms went to war.
|
| Onwards and upwards! Bigger weapons than before!
|
| Boggy B. took cover, he shivered on patrol.
|
| The arms race: crazy, simply way out of control.
| jedberg wrote:
| Man I gotta say that experience was ruined by the 10 second ad
| I had to endure ahead of it. I really wish YouTube would just
| not try to monetize videos that are shorter than the ads.
| noman-land wrote:
| NewPipe or uBlock Origin will prevent your experiences from
| being ruined in the future.
| jedberg wrote:
| Oh I know I have them installed but my "HN browser" is
| Safari which doesn't have plugins.
| linearrust wrote:
| You beat me to it. As soon as I read the title, I heard it in
| my mind.
| ornornor wrote:
| I tried many times to set this sound as my sms notification
| sound for nostalgia... and gave up every time. It sounded great
| on the computer but it's very jarring and obnoxious on the
| phone when it runs out of nowhere. Unfortunate because
| nostalgia
| flkiwi wrote:
| This is my text message tone for a few key family members. It
| brings me joy on the rare occasions my phone isn't muted.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| I will remember that sound for the rest of my life.
| dark-star wrote:
| tangentially related:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0iqM_AnSuo
|
| The ICQ Song, by Alchemy
| slavik81 wrote:
| www.nevergetoveryou by Prozzak would be the song I first
| think of. The ICQ "uh-oh" is in the chorus.
| https://youtu.be/3wnQcZ3HaBQ
| forinti wrote:
| I knew a girl who could imitate perfectly that. Great party
| trick.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Party trick for 40 somethings.
| atonse wrote:
| 3383011 - I still remember my ICQ number 20+ years later :)
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| 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.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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."
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > mostly just Russians wanting to practice their English
|
| I guess that explains their recommendation of VK Messenger as a
| replacement.
|
| 360487731
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| > 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
| FpUser wrote:
| I remember I paid $600 or so to Mirabilis around 1996 to
| buy their http server library to save the development time.
| mbrameld wrote:
| 259804 - Now I kind of want to see if I can still log in.
| vicnov wrote:
| Many years ago go a girl who liked me gifted a 6 digit icq
| number.
|
| I still remember that. Sigh.
| olliej wrote:
| 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
| joshuaissac wrote:
| You can bypass the phone number login using the link on the top
| left, and instead login with your ICQ number and password.
| olliej wrote:
| yeah, that was my edit but I realize I didn't actually
| clarify that just what it was doing. But it then will just
| claim your account has been compromised until you give them a
| number :D
| joshuaissac wrote:
| You can bypass that second screen as well (or at least, it
| let me do so for my account).
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| 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).
| pndy wrote:
| IIRC GG is in 5th hands now since Lukasz Foltyn created it
| sharpshadow wrote:
| Good old times playing those games with strangers and exchanging
| pictures, then after ICQ we used Skype.
| jordemort wrote:
| 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.
| brassattax wrote:
| I believe you're right on this. The original ICQ number
| accounts got merged into AOL Instant Messenger, and for a while
| you could log into AIM with your ICQ number. I think the
| original ICQ died when AIM got shut down.
| 0xDEADFED5 wrote:
| i was able to sign in with my number and password just now, had
| to click link in the upper left to get around the phone number
| request
| 89vision wrote:
| 2476319, got it in 1997 or 1998
| badwolf wrote:
| 677808. RIP old friend.
| johnbellone wrote:
| 91245402
| dwhitney wrote:
| 501108 - never forget
| giantrobot wrote:
| 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.
| mmastrac wrote:
| 4089460. No idea why that number is stuck in my brain.
| whitehexagon wrote:
| spooky, only last month I was trying to recover my password, oh
| for those simpler days on the internet. 36063000
| twojobsoneboss wrote:
| Uh oh!
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| 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?
| Zak wrote:
| ICQ is/was mainly for one-to-one and small group chats, much
| like Signal or WhatsApp. I don't think that use case needs a
| large moderation staff; I consider even having the ability to
| do most kinds of moderation an anti-feature in that kind of
| tool since it means the communication is not truly private.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Bye bye WarSheeps
| brightrhino wrote:
| 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
| mmh0000 wrote:
| 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.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| 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.
| pcurve wrote:
| I'm sure most people know this already, but ICQ stood for I Seek
| You.
| racl101 wrote:
| End of an era.
| davidpolberger wrote:
| 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.
| coolspot wrote:
| That's a very impressive UIN!
| inversetelecine wrote:
| Same, nice repeating digits. 2288665
| jtriangle wrote:
| Strictly speaking, sequential numbers can scale infinitely, so
| not the worst way to handle it.
| passwordle wrote:
| bro, nice dubs!
| kinow wrote:
| UINs! I didn't remember how we called ICQ numbers! Thank you!
| robertheadley wrote:
| End of an error. I mean Era.
| wantsanagent wrote:
| 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 :)
| esafak wrote:
| I remember my UIN but not password. Weird how that works!
| conradfr wrote:
| 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 :)
| pocketsand wrote:
| 2854684
|
| Not an elite 6 number UIN, but at least on the bottom side of 7
| digits.
| chisness wrote:
| 15203830
| yazantapuz wrote:
| Many good memories... Goodbye from 99184387
| Valodim wrote:
| Eyoo I was 99485387 just two digits diff, nice!
| pleo__ wrote:
| 21863839
|
| Yup... still remember it! Crazy!
|
| Sad to see this go.
| iriomote wrote:
| 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
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| see you on the flip side
| kzzzznot wrote:
| RIP ICQ
|
| Spent a lot of my childhood using it.
| grishka wrote:
| 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.
| doktrin wrote:
| I wonder how many others instantly recalled the ICQ notification
| sound on reading the headline.
| kubatyszko wrote:
| The last bastion of the old Internet, end of an era!
| agumonkey wrote:
| I wonder how many machine operates it and if there's a GDPR
| 'backup your data' feature hehe
| devin wrote:
| Uh oh!
| lastdong wrote:
| 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.
| asternfern wrote:
| 116633 Good times!
| yumraj wrote:
| 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.
| philjackson wrote:
| "Uh oh"
| tored wrote:
| 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.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| I remember when Pidgin was my defacto chat app because it had
| all of the platforms and none of the bloat.
| inversetelecine wrote:
| and it's brother Adium on OS X.
| geocrasher wrote:
| Uh oh!
| pablo1 wrote:
| 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
| pmarreck wrote:
| 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!)
| teel wrote:
| My finnish phone number did not work either with web login,
| although I dont think I ever saved it anywhere back then. But
| succeeded to login with UID and password that I have luckily
| been keeping in safe (post-its first in the 90s, keepass
| nowadays)
| 0xblinq wrote:
| 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.
| tacone wrote:
| 420702
|
| Thank you ICQ!
| hk1337 wrote:
| I didn't even know it was still working
| hylaride wrote:
| I think until recently it was still popular (or used enough) in
| Russia when Telegram finally took over.
| linearrust wrote:
| 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.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| 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.
| sunaookami wrote:
| They repurposed it into a Telegram clone a few years ago, they
| even had nearly the same bot API and you could import stickers.
| The desktop client is also a near copycat. It was called "ICQ
| New"
| EGreg wrote:
| 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?
| mongol wrote:
| ICQ had a first mover advantage, and lost it. But why?
| toast0 wrote:
| Being first mover isn't an advantage, mostly.
|
| Atari is dead. Shoutcast is dead. Compuserve and GEnie are long
| dead, AOL is dead too. Outside of forums like these, nobody
| knows who made the first personal computers or smartphones,
| because it doesn't matter to them.
|
| It's a lot easier to build the second insant messaging system
| than the first because you can see how it works before you
| build it.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| moonlion_eth wrote:
| I met my first girlfriend on icq
| leobg wrote:
| I remember setting up a TTS system to announce the names of my
| friends as they came online.
|
| "Fledermaus is online"
| gargs wrote:
| 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(tm) file transfer, and the wonderful contact list with
| people decorating their names with ASCII art. I made some
| wonderful friends in real life.
| aeyes wrote:
| I don't remember file transfer being very reliable, it used
| direct connections between clients so if you had a router it
| wouldn't work.
| gargs wrote:
| We only had dial-up connections with a real IPv4 address back
| when I used ICQ.
| slater wrote:
| 10902983 sez bye, too. I lost the account cos this genius right
| here chose a male first name as the password.
| user3939382 wrote:
| 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 :(
| fabianholzer wrote:
| 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/)
| adamomada wrote:
| This reminded me of a random post I think I saw on here about
| the same thing happening on Club Penguin, I wonder about the
| last message on there
|
| I had absolutely no connection to the service at all, but the
| shutdown gave me a weird feeling of loss, perhaps because it
| was in visual form and the shutdown was recorded on video?
| Zolrath wrote:
| Can't remember my driver's license number but will never forget
| 13658022. RIP
| sixothree wrote:
| ICQ later.
| szundi wrote:
| Good old days
| septune wrote:
| 54443480
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| 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.
| lproven wrote:
| Try Ferdium, RAMbox, or Station.
|
| All FOSS.
|
| https://ferdium.org/
|
| https://rambox.app/
|
| https://getstation.com/
| nunez wrote:
| Agreed. Messaging absolutely blows compared to the glory days
| of a million interoperable chat clients with no one looking to
| exploit users for "increased engagement." I miss it all of the
| time. Beeper's trying to bring it back, but you can see, in
| real-time, how actively other companies are in trying to lock
| them out.
| trollerator23 wrote:
| Damn, icq, the memories.
| Ajay-p wrote:
| 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.
| locallost wrote:
| 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
| whycome wrote:
| 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)
| ssfrr wrote:
| just googling didn't come up with anything for me. were there
| specific sites you found info on?
| kolistivra wrote:
| I'm curious too!
| goykasi wrote:
| 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.
| xp84 wrote:
| "name of some girl i liked at the time" plus a couple numbers
| if needed for shorter names... That was basically the template
| we all used at first, in those innocent days.
| gbraad wrote:
| 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?
| flexagoon wrote:
| > Though this one actually outlasted my expectations: AOL
| owned... But why does it mention VK?
|
| Because ICQ was bought by VK in 2010
| teuobk wrote:
| 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
| tristanb wrote:
| 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.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| 194194984
|
| Terrible, terrible news. So many events in my life are linked to
| ICQ...
|
| Do we have a chance to save it?
| DEADMINCE wrote:
| 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.
| zeamp wrote:
| It has been years since they let me use my ultra short ICQ number
| from the 1990s.
|
| See ya'!
| felixg3 wrote:
| 664427 - RIP
| vi2837 wrote:
| Hm, I dont' remember it now, it was over 20 years old :).
| itomato wrote:
| Muscle memory, do your stuff!
|
| 43411944
| maremmano wrote:
| 1824942
|
| not used in years but very good memories!
| culebron21 wrote:
| 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.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| "You cannot recover the password" :-(
| Kye wrote:
| 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.
| karlward wrote:
| Good old 20854206. Can't believe I managed to log back in just
| now. Nothing there though.
| andycowley wrote:
| 94280666
| localfirst wrote:
| so its owned by VK now ? how did that happen
| flexagoon wrote:
| They bought it back in 2010
| hitekker wrote:
| I never used ICQ but I have listened to this song on repeat since
| 2007 https://youtu.be/xVdMiHmnf_I?si=5rwC12kLsNZ0u7ON&t=74
| standardUser wrote:
| 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.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Even when IM started to break because it was too awesome not to
| try to monopolize, Trillian (back in 2000!) showed how
| interoperability was superconvenient to rein in the nascent
| feudalism and give power back to the users... until the bigger
| players put a stop to that.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillian_(software)
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > until the bigger players put a stop to that
|
| The problem is that the legal system is misused to prevent
| adversarial interoperability.
|
| Adversarial interoperability was never explicitly welcomed by
| gatekeepers, but back then nobody would think of suing over
| it, nor prosecuting such a case.
|
| Nowadays, copyright law is used as a reason to shut those
| things down, even when the copyrighted content is actually
| third-party user-generated content or content you do have a
| license to access since it's freely accessible using the
| official client.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Back when computing was a tool to make users' life better, not
| a way to profit off wasting their time by "engaging" them.
| adamomada wrote:
| Are you joking? The only universal messaging was, and still is,
| email (edit and SMS, I guess)
|
| IRC
|
| ICQ
|
| AIM
|
| MSN Messenger
|
| Y! Messenger
|
| Etc
|
| You not only needed to know the ID but also the service to send
| it on, which is exactly the same situation today. Except for
| email
| bananamerica wrote:
| Seems to be offline.
| tylervigen wrote:
| 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.
| ranza wrote:
| 86886958 add me
| nikeee wrote:
| 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
| tunnuz wrote:
| I can still remember my ICQ number by heart, but have no access
| to it.
| oniony wrote:
| 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.
| lvspiff wrote:
| I think ive heard this before....did matt damon sing a song
| about sleeping with your gf so then you took off to find this
| girl and ended up going on a tour across europe with your best
| friend and a pair of twins?
| adamomada wrote:
| shhh, Scottie Doesn't Know
| richarme wrote:
| 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.
| sedatk wrote:
| ICQ even had a realtime chat feature that showed keystrokes as
| they were typed.
| ihaveajob wrote:
| That was my favorite feature. And the random match part, way
| earlier than ChatRoulette. I remember talking to some kid in
| the Philippines about the history of her country and mine
| (Spain). Mind-blowing at the time.
| sorenjan wrote:
| 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.
| nu11ptr wrote:
| 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.
| memming wrote:
| I even remembered my password as well. I found a few really old
| friends that I have lost touch for decades still online.
| booleanbetrayal wrote:
| 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
| joering2 wrote:
| less than quarter mil number, that's very very early on! mine
| is over 3.8 million, and I created it relatively early on
| considering I was living in Europe :)
|
| I think I remember my number because back then when you had to
| reinstall software or put it on new machine you always went by
| your number, instead of your email or username. That's why I
| think I still remember it :)
| booleanbetrayal wrote:
| That's a good point! Funny how some things get permanently
| lodged in some brain folds.
| system2 wrote:
| 555655 :)
|
| I wish internet didn't evolve. mIRC and ICQ were magical.
| rkaregaran wrote:
| hit me up, 3080031
| teel wrote:
| 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.
| nirv wrote:
| #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.
| BlackLotus89 wrote:
| 293691201 - am logged in over pidgin right now^^ still works
| although nobody of my 187 contacts is online. Miss the times
| alluro2 wrote:
| 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.
| m_eiman wrote:
| I remember coding im_kit on BeOS and chatting along over ICQ, AIM
| and others. Happy days!
| miscellanemone wrote:
| BeOS 5 Pro and Gobe Productive! I still have those CDs
| somewhere.
| flerchin wrote:
| 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"
| roboben wrote:
| An era ends. Still remembering my number. 9 digits!
| Vaslo wrote:
| Ultima Online plus ICQ, those were the days
| m3kw9 wrote:
| A oh!
| richardw wrote:
| 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.
| 51Cards wrote:
| 2174769 I still have my UIN memorized what... 25 years later? Sad
| to see it go even though I left the platform ages ago.
| tunnuz wrote:
| Can any of you billionaires save this?
| designium wrote:
| Wow, one of the last vestiges of the original WWW going away.
| bradfitz wrote:
| 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. :)
| nogridbag wrote:
| Hah, cool. I had a similar experience with Xoom.com (the
| website hosting company). They sent me a job application
| because I had been volunteering in their forums for a while,
| assisting people with developing websites.
|
| I still remember going into my parents room to tell them I'm
| applying for a job and they had no idea what I was talking
| about. I submitted the application, and the Xoom staff had a
| good chuckle as they had no idea I was ~14 at the time.
| mathrawka wrote:
| Mirabilis contacted you?
|
| I worked on some ICQ software in high school, and was the
| maintainer of large user base ICQ clone. I still own the
| domain: licq.org
|
| Never got a single job offer, guess they saw my code and went
| running away ;)
| teajunky wrote:
| Thanks for licq. This was my favourite client.
| stephane-klein wrote:
| 52276034 here :)
| techas wrote:
| 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" :)
| pryelluw wrote:
| I met my wife on ICQ back in 1998. End of an era. Thank you for
| the life changing software.
| kemiller wrote:
| Whoa it was still going??
| jayess wrote:
| 8335393
| thomashabets2 wrote:
| 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.
| avodonosov wrote:
| 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
| vascocosta wrote:
| 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?
| havkom wrote:
| #14401370
| banish-m4 wrote:
| Ahh the good old days of multiprotocol Trillian rather than
| adware.
| kirenida wrote:
| Anybody remember Odigo?
| everdrive wrote:
| 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.
| Distilitron wrote:
| Finaly! Great news!
| geoffbp wrote:
| Uh ow
| kinow wrote:
| 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.
| remyp wrote:
| So long, and thanks for all the fish. -85907003
| ByteMe95 wrote:
| uh oh!
| dkga wrote:
| 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.
| omnibrain wrote:
| 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.
| neom wrote:
| 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.
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