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ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

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Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#191

Post by glandium »

mutagen wrote: post #67
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.

538342. Had a weak / compromised password for ages, I'm surprised to have been able to access my account and change to a stronger password. I'm not sure the popularity of 6 digit accounts and the password compromise times overlapped much though. Had some great times chatting to people all around the world on ICQ. I think I still have a couple of FB friends from that era. I was bouncing an idea of an IRC like pager ap…

I'm surprised I remembered the password at all, and I can't change it without giving out a mobile phone number for a SMS. No thanks.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#192

Post by cstuder »

ICQ had changed the online experience for me: For the first time I was able to see actual people and friends surfing the web at the same time. I was no longer alone.

Previously, with Compuserve and BBSs, I've only been using asynchroneous communication forms like mail or forums. (I stayed away from chat rooms, but I don't remember why.)

Nowadays I don't even use any messenger app which shows the online/offline status. I just assume everyone is online all the time...

(Ah yes, ICQ# 188126. Lost my password before I found out that you could actually sell low numbers like that for good money.)

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#193

Post by vurpo »

scott_s wrote: post #51

smacks forehead I seek you. I don't think I ever got that. And it was my primary messaging platform for a long time - I grudgingly made the move to AIM sometime around 2002. I felt that ICQ allowed more in-depth conversations; IM was much more call-and-response.

CQ has been used for over a century as a call by radio operators (mostly in Morse code, where it's encoded as -.-. --.-). It's a general call that invites any operators that receive it to respond to you.

It actually originated from the French word sécurité, but in English-language countries it was quickly backronym'd to become an abbreviation of "seek you".

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#194

Post by NTripleOne »

antjanus wrote: post #187
sofaofthedamned wrote: post #26

Everybody is missing the elephant in the room with ICQ, which is why it was popular: In my mid 20's, i'd come back from the pub drunk, login, search for girls online now near me and send them messages. Was usually somebody drunk at the other end, had a few fleeting relationships from that. Nothing since, including Facebook, has had that same immediacy.

in my home country, it was also cheaper to send an ICQ message via WAP than sending a text message. It was such a clever work around expensive texting.

Meanwhile I'd connect to WAP and my £10 monthly phone credit would be gone in seconds flat...

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#195

Post by pimeys »

flukus wrote: post #115
pimeys wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, on this side of the fence it pretty much still works as OP described. Nothing has changed and you don't even need to be drunk!

Difference is, the gay community (or some subset of it that I don't know the size of) has always had it's quick hook up methods.

Nothing so comfortable you can use from your home. Of course the public parks in Berlin are still the other option, or just spending your night in Berghain.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#196

Post by NTripleOne »

digi_owl wrote: post #171
kalleboo wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden went something like ICQ/IRC -> MSN -> Skype Chat -> WhatsApp. I think AIM was only ever popular in the US ( America On Line after all). The interesting period was when IRC was still popular even among non-techies. The girls in school would sit on the PCs in mIRC.

Only other place i can think of that may have had AOL was UK, and then only because i noticed some AOL ads on satellite tv channels from there.

Yeah we had AOL over here. I used AIM once, didn't like it and went back to using YIM and MSN.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#197

Post by NTripleOne »

twostorytower wrote: post #180

Haha I guess we can just ignore the end where ICQ becomes a near perfect copy of Snapchat in the last year? True innovation. I mean look at those screenshots. It's more direct than what Instagram did.

Speaking of "old service becomes something else", anyone seen what Bebo has become recently...? It's uhh... interesting.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#198

Post by Matthias247 »

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…

That's awesome!

I remember these days when I studied (2002-2007) - before that the official ICQ client was the Go-To messenger. But as you said - people got annoyed by the introduced app. Then at university everybody had ICQ. It was the defacto communication mechanism - even between people that lived in adjacent rooms. And at some time all of those people started to move to Miranda at once, so you could probably find it on 1000s of PCs on the campus. New plugins came up all the time and were discussed.

I think we all greatly enjoyed the ability to show status/away messages on mouseover. And on the other side the ability to display a notification when someone has read your away message :) That lead to some very interesting usage patterns and conversations.

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