I remember setting up a TTS system to announce the names of my friends as they came online.
“Fledermaus is online”
ICQ will stop working from June 26
221–230 of 776 posts
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#222This makes me sad. I mean, I haven't logged in in about 20 years now, and couldn't if I wanted to (don't have the password or access to the email address). But I had a low five digit user number, and built a lot of relationships on ICQ (some of which continue today!). It was my main method of electronic communication in college. I had romantic relationships live and die on ICQ. Another reminder of how things change o…
4125222 I still remember it but not the pass
Pretty close to mine. 4367571. Must have registered a month apart.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#223> ICQ will stop working from June 26 > You can chat with friends in VK Messenger, and with colleagues in VK WorkSpace Was ICQ like Livejournal, where it had a lot more popularity and staying power in Russia than in the West?
Kind of like WhatsApp vs iMessage, ICQ was more international than alternatives like AIM or MSN
And dunno about AIM, but MSN took a looooong time to implement things like offline messaging. ICQ didn’t (ever?) need the double coincidence of being online. Even iMessage and its fallback SMS today are bad for this.
Fun MSN story: I read you could put curse words in your name subtitle if you used 0x ascii hex codes for one of the characters.
So I pulled up the list of ascii codes and hoped that “beep” would work, but it did not make anyone beep. Then I tried null, and it made all my contacts go offline, and offline again as soon as they logged back in. Again and again. Except myself (can’t remember if that was because I used a 3rd party client aMSN) Hehe. Had people apologize to me for suddenly dropping mid convo.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
My reading (and maybe I'm wrong because the comment was terse) is that IRC will never die, because it is not a commercial interest that can be shuttered. It's an open protocol and anyone can spin up a server. Any community you build inside a walled garden can be taken from you. I do think that is important to keep in mind.
It can't die because of that, but the reason we use things like reddit and discord and slack is because those are not open protocols -- they have monied interests behind getting people to use them The idealism of the internet in the 80s and 90s never could survive past the growth phase.
I think everything you said was true, but I would point out that I think of this as a practical rather than ideological position. I'm not saying it never makes sense to build inside of a walled garden, I'm saying there is a costly tradeoff. I would speculate that it might be more important going forward, but time will tell.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#225It was way ahead of its time even in the 90s. I remember being swooned by the real-time typing windows, amazing sound effects, Just Works™ file transfer, and the wonderful contact list with people decorating their names with ASCII art. I made some wonderful friends in real life.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#226This makes me sad. I mean, I haven't logged in in about 20 years now, and couldn't if I wanted to (don't have the password or access to the email address). But I had a low five digit user number, and built a lot of relationships on ICQ (some of which continue today!). It was my main method of electronic communication in college. I had romantic relationships live and die on ICQ. Another reminder of how things change o…
I remember the music/sound when ICQ used to load up. The logo was brilliant. Nostalgia. Circa 1999-2001 when I used it heavily. Best part though: finding strangers and becoming online friends with many of them (without worrying about scams etc).
I certainly ran into scammers on ICQ.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#22710902983 sez bye, too. I lost the account cos this genius right here chose a male first name as the password.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#228I signed up for it to complete my config of Trillian, which I thought was totally amazing at the time. Too much sad computing nostalgia :(
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can't die because of that, but the reason we use things like reddit and discord and slack is because those are not open protocols -- they have monied interests behind getting people to use them The idealism of the internet in the 80s and 90s never could survive past the growth phase.
I don't use reddit, discord and slack because they are not open protocols. I use them because of the network effect and only reluctantly. Look at the relatively recent success of software like bittorrent and know that idealism and commercialism both live and die by the network effect. We aren't doomed to live in walled gardens forever.
I think you can credit a win to IRC recently, too, when someone tried to buy control of Freenode and it seems (as least as an onlooker) that everyone successfully coordinated upping stakes and moving to a new network. I don't use IRC, but I find that impressive.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
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