They just took the repo down.
Fork: https://github.com/fungosforks/icq-desktop
That's a dodgy looking commit, wonder what else is lurking. https://github.com/fungosforks/icq-desktop/commit/eced2373c6...
Sources of ICQ desktop client by mail.ru
61–70 of 78 posts
Re: Sources of ICQ desktop client by mail.ru
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Well, ICQ was very popular up to 2005-2010. MSN was never a popular choice (in fact it was not popular at all). So people usually used ICQ, Skype and Jabber. Gmail+GTalk done the job killing ICQ for most here.
MSN was the dominant messenger in pretty much the whole world apart from the US where Yahoo was dominant.
In 2006 ComScore rated MSN having 61% of the world market and 90% in South America. Interestingly, Europe had far more messenger users than the US too. (all from here: http://betanews.com/2006/04/11/msn-messenger-most-used-im-cl...)
Re: Sources of ICQ desktop client by mail.ru
#63Is 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 seem to recall ICQ's popularity already being in free-fall by 2000. My guess would be that as former AOL users switched to local ISPs, they would download the familiar AIM instead of ICQ. Most of my ICQ friends were internet friends; everyone at school used AIM. EDIT: according to Wikipedia, ICQ peaked in 2001.
At some point ICQ made some really bad development decisions and people avoided the new versions like the plague.
I can't remember which version in particular was in demand, but I do remember lots of sites specifically serving up the installers of the old versions.
Re: Sources of ICQ desktop client by mail.ru
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Well, ICQ was very popular up to 2005-2010. MSN was never a popular choice (in fact it was not popular at all). So people usually used ICQ, Skype and Jabber. Gmail+GTalk done the job killing ICQ for most here.
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Re: Sources of ICQ desktop client by mail.ru
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I seem to have a different experience. Everyone migrated to Yahoo or AIM with MSN a distant third. In my social circle, yahoo was the king of chat for a very long time.
Parent might be in Europe and you in the US. Back in those days that's how the IM market shares were roughly distributed among my peers.
Yep. I'm in Brazil and the friends I mentioned are in Europe.
Re: Sources of ICQ desktop client by mail.ru
#66Is 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... 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…
>> I really wonder how they dropped the ball...
>Failing to give people usernames.
If this is really the case then we can expect skype to die soon. I remember some time ago you were able to add contacts using skype logins, recently I was trying to do that on my friends Windows machine and failed. I simply wasn't able to add myself to his friendlist. I found somewhere on MS forum information that if you need that kind of functionality you should instead provide more information about you so you'd be easier to find...
Re: Sources of ICQ desktop client by mail.ru
#67Is 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 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 have it set as the notification sound for a friend with whom I exchange text messages very frequently. After we graduated from high school in 1999 we communicated with ICQ almost exclusively for the first couple of years until we switched to MSN Messenger, so it constitutes a form of vestigial nostalgia.
I'm surprised to read of people hating it so much.
Re: Sources of ICQ desktop client by mail.ru
#68I had a meeting with the ICQ founders and senior engineers in 2000.
At the time, they were using 9 T1's, which even then seemed pretty small as far as bandwidth goes.
Re: Sources of ICQ desktop client by mail.ru
#69Subseven always worked well with ICQ :D
Re: Sources of ICQ desktop client by mail.ru
#70Say 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 wish I could remember any of the info that I used with ICQ. I can't even remember the e-mail that I used back then. It's been so long.