Uh oh!
ICQ will stop working from June 26
121–130 of 776 posts
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#122Well... 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 appr…
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.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#123It'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?
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#124Bye bye WarSheeps
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#125My 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
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#126Oh 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.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#127This 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.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#1281303789 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.
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.
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".
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#129I'm sure most people know this already, but ICQ stood for I Seek You.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#130End of an era.