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ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

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Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#121

Post by haldean »

stormbrew wrote: post #33
digi_owl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think ICQ (along with non-technical IRC) took a gut punch when Microsoft bundled MSN Messenger with Windows XP. Almost over night people were switching to (or adopting) MSNM, often reproducing online the cliques already existing in the local communities.

Are you Canadian by any chance? MSN only ever really seemed to take off in some specific regions, one of which was Canada. After ICQ, almost all my American contacts moved to AIM. Which was honestly pretty awful, since MSNM was much nicer.

Can confirm: everyone I knew in Belgium growing up used MSN, but no one I met at my American college had ever used it.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#122

Post by jhasse »

drinchev wrote: post #113
mikey_p wrote: post #64

The craziest thing about all of this, is that my number 7672xxx still works! Every few years I download the client, and my username and password from the late 90s is still valid. This is no small feat in the age of shutdowns and spin-offs. In other news, WebRings still exists as well.

Just a question. I see more of the commenters have posted their ICQ UIDs with the last digits hidden, like yours ( xxx in the end ). Is there a particular reason for not revealing it?

Passwords weren't very secure back then :P

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#124

Post by Elhana »

swozey wrote: post #50
drinchev wrote: post #44

My ICQ UID is 15584496 . I still remember people buying less-digits or easy-to-remember digits accounts for real money. Gosh, I just logged in. Kudos for not auto-deleting my account for so many years.

163766. Had tons of people asking to buy it. Too bad I can't even log in since it's tied to my email address from 4th or 5th grade. I think the numbers started at 100000. Prior to that, elementary school, I used PowWow and Mplayer to socialize with pretty much only Californians.. since everyone on the internet back then lived in CA. That was a weird time. I of course was 18 for.. oh, 10 years. I believe I've met 2-3…

Numbers started at 10000, uin 31337 was one of the AOL admins.

141181 here btw, everyone is offline. One friend used icq until maybe a year ago, offline now too.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#125

Post by pmlnr »

FigBug wrote: post #9

Around 2000 I got annoyed with the ads and crap in ICQ, so I wrote Miranda ICQ, now called Miranda IM ( http://www.miranda-im.org/ ) based on libicq. One of my main inspirations to write the app was I wanted to connect a chatbot to ICQ to harass my friends, but the standard API wouldn't allow sending messages. So I added a plugin API, connected the MegaHAL chatbot and good times ensued. I lost interest in Miranda sho…

The early Trillian ~0.72; that one I really loved; I found Miranda later, so that I never really used.

A while ago I digged around in my computer and collected _all_ the chat logs I was able to find: Trillian, MSN, Pidgin, Empathy, Thunderbird, XChat, Facebook, and normalized them to plain text. They were in all sorts of formats: line-by-line XML, JSON, per file JSON, per file XML, text, HTML. (I had to exclude Skype due to it's binary log.) If you have any logs, do a similar normalization as soon as possible, it will only get more painful. Anyway, the trillian logs were exceptionally ugly with with the line-by-line all data in attributes XML, but hey, the user interface and the connect to any platform was awesome.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#126

Post by khc »

drinchev wrote: post #113
mikey_p wrote: post #64

The craziest thing about all of this, is that my number 7672xxx still works! Every few years I download the client, and my username and password from the late 90s is still valid. This is no small feat in the age of shutdowns and spin-offs. In other news, WebRings still exists as well.

Just a question. I see more of the commenters have posted their ICQ UIDs with the last digits hidden, like yours ( xxx in the end ). Is there a particular reason for not revealing it?

because low digit ICQ UIDs were for sale at a price and some people stole other people's accounts for profit

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#127

Post by pmlnr »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #120
jandrese wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unix talk is pretty close. Also, BBS chat software would be another good example, although that was somewhat rare since few BBS systems had multiple lines and even on the ones that did you wouldn't just hang out waiting to chat. I missed the low UIN boat on ICQ because I was solidly into FreeBSD back then and the ICQ client was only on Windows. It also looked sketchy as hell with the crudely drawn flower icon and pub…

What about IRC?

IRC is not a messenger-type thing; it's not a local client, it never had a system-wide single handle - you had to register on each network, if it was possible at all.

The typing and receiving may be similar, but the approach is different.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#128

Post by justusw »

pmlnr wrote: post #125
FigBug wrote: post #9

Around 2000 I got annoyed with the ads and crap in ICQ, so I wrote Miranda ICQ, now called Miranda IM ( http://www.miranda-im.org/ ) based on libicq. One of my main inspirations to write the app was I wanted to connect a chatbot to ICQ to harass my friends, but the standard API wouldn't allow sending messages. So I added a plugin API, connected the MegaHAL chatbot and good times ensued. I lost interest in Miranda sho…

The early Trillian ~0.72; that one I really loved; I found Miranda later, so that I never really used. A while ago I digged around in my computer and collected _all_ the chat logs I was able to find: Trillian, MSN, Pidgin, Empathy, Thunderbird, XChat, Facebook, and normalized them to plain text. They were in all sorts of formats: line-by-line XML, JSON, per file JSON, per file XML, text, HTML. (I had to exclude Skype…

Most versions of Skype use SQLite for local storage, if that is of any help!

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#129

Post by stevewillows »

swozey wrote: post #50
drinchev wrote: post #44

My ICQ UID is 15584496 . I still remember people buying less-digits or easy-to-remember digits accounts for real money. Gosh, I just logged in. Kudos for not auto-deleting my account for so many years.

163766. Had tons of people asking to buy it. Too bad I can't even log in since it's tied to my email address from 4th or 5th grade. I think the numbers started at 100000. Prior to that, elementary school, I used PowWow and Mplayer to socialize with pretty much only Californians.. since everyone on the internet back then lived in CA. That was a weird time. I of course was 18 for.. oh, 10 years. I believe I've met 2-3…

You can get it back! I was in the same spot.

Contact ICQ support and tell them that you no longer have access to that email. You'll confirm your UIN and a few names from your user list. It took about a day to get mine back.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#130

Post by pmlnr »

jandrese wrote: post #104
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda the point now a days. Everyone wants platform lock-in.

This drives me so crazy. Usability has regressed because everyone wants to control everything. As far as I know it's not possible to get one app that combines Google Hangouts, iMessage, Facebook Messager, WhatsApp, etc... into one place like you could with the old messaging apps. Now you have to leave 10 things running all the time just to keep your connections.

If text is enough, Bitlbee, combined with libpurple is pretty close to combine all: https://wiki.bitlbee.org/
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