41–50 of 78 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can still remember the "uh-oh" sound. I remember searching for and download sound boards to replace the sounds. They also had that chat window where you could actually the user typing. Nostalgia eh.
I'm not 100% certain about this, but I always felt like they stole that sound from the game Worms.
Is this a leak or a release? Anyway, it seems like 5-10 years too late. I remember when I was in school (till 2003) that ICQ was huge. People knew their ICQ numbers by heart, and it was as important as e.g. WhatsApp or Facebook is today. It even anticipated microblogging - you could set a custom "status message", and people would check each others messages to see what others were doing. They had a lot of features tha…
From what I remember ICQ was always fairly nerdy and once everyone's non-nerd friends started showing up on AIM they had to make the switch. One thing I miss from ICQ was the ability to have messages stored on the server and delivered next time your friend logged in. None of the popular messaging apps today do that. I also remember that ICQ made a huge mess of their webpage back in the dawn of the dotcom era.
You mean aside Skype, Facebook messenger, Slack and Whatsapp? And those are just the 4 services I currently (and reluctantly) use. So there's going to be others I've not mentioned.
Is this a leak or a release? Anyway, it seems like 5-10 years too late. I remember when I was in school (till 2003) that ICQ was huge. People knew their ICQ numbers by heart, and it was as important as e.g. WhatsApp or Facebook is today. It even anticipated microblogging - you could set a custom "status message", and people would check each others messages to see what others were doing. They had a lot of features tha…
Failing to give people usernames.
> People knew their ICQ numbers by heart
Some did, but the fact that you emphasise that as something remarkable is a hint here. I specifically remember the numbers as being a significant source of friction when connecting to new people. For contrast, I still easily remember what my username on MSN Messenger was when I started using that in around 2000 -- because it was my email address.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Desktop software always had a friction that the web didn't. Desktop software was fine, until you were in an internet cafe, at a friend's house, or most importantly, at work, where computers were locked down. You couldn't use msn messenger at work, you could use facebook because it was just a web page.
There were plenty of web-based MSN Messenger clients.
Thankfully we now have a whole array of better technologies available and wider support for them. So we're not as reliant on browser plugins nor native clients (though frankly I still prefer native clients).
Is this a leak or a release? Anyway, it seems like 5-10 years too late. I remember when I was in school (till 2003) that ICQ was huge. People knew their ICQ numbers by heart, and it was as important as e.g. WhatsApp or Facebook is today. It even anticipated microblogging - you could set a custom "status message", and people would check each others messages to see what others were doing. They had a lot of features tha…
Is this a leak or a release? Anyway, it seems like 5-10 years too late. I remember when I was in school (till 2003) that ICQ was huge. People knew their ICQ numbers by heart, and it was as important as e.g. WhatsApp or Facebook is today. It even anticipated microblogging - you could set a custom "status message", and people would check each others messages to see what others were doing. They had a lot of features tha…
> I really wonder how they dropped the ball. In my country, ICQ died when Microsoft started shipping MSN Messenger with Windows and worked hard to make people aware of it. (Microsoft even did a silly marketing campaign for MSN that involved a guy dressed as a butterfly). People used the Messenger that was already installed in their OS, and ICQ was history. I believe the same thing happened in most other countries, be…
They just took the repo down.
Taken down.
Say what you will about ICQ, but I can still log in with my number and password from the late 90s and see the names of the people I chatted with in high school in my contacts list. This is nothing short of somewhat amazing in the world of software startups and shutterings, etc. FWIW, I've also realized that my Yahoo account from circa 1996 works just as well. my.yahoo.com even remembers what news topics, stocks, weat…
I miss ICQ. Well, I still use it occasionally, since it's part of my MirandaIM setup. But I miss it whenever I use Skype for IMs. For starters, I can aggregate ICQ, Jabber and a bunch of other services inside one lightweight open-source client. Also, it had an entirely different social vibe, which is missing from Skype. It was okay to chat with near-strangers in ICQ. It was okay to add people from some random forum to your contact list. It was okay to say "hi" to people when they went online (as opposed to always-online on 10 different devices Skype mentality).