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ICQ will stop working from June 26

icq.com

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Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#311

Post by nikeee »

The good thing with the time of ICQ was that it was common that 3rd party messengers implemented the protocol. I used QiP and Pidgin. With Pidgin, it was possible to have all chat history across different chat networks (MSN, ICQ, IRC, Jabber) and accounts in once central place. I still have the chat history to this day.

Today, the only multi-protocol clients you get is "Slack/Discord/Teams/etc as tabs inside electron". Every app is isolated and keeps their history.

Thank you for your service -- 286841327

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#313

Post by freedomben »

RankingMember wrote: post #69
jan_Sate wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike ICQ, mIRC is just an IRC client and even if it dies, the IRC networks would remain accessible using other IRC clients. That said it'd be a pity if mIRC dies.

I'd hope Khaled would open source it if he decides to give it up

This is starting to feel even more important now that HexChat is over.[1]

Is anyone aware of maintained forks or a revival effort?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39326630

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#314

Post by passwordle »

davidpolberger wrote: post #132

I know this doesn't add much value to the discussion, but I was really proud of my UIN when I was a teenager. And this may be my last chance to flaunt it, so here it is: 1779900 So back in the day, these were known as Universal Internet Numbers, or UINs. You have to admire the sheer audacity of using that name for the user identifiers of a service you're building. I believe they were renamed to "ICQ#" later.

bro, nice dubs!

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#315

Post by oniony »

Man, loved ICQ. I used to text chat to the early hours with this Greek girl I met online. It was platonic but we got quite close and exchange physical letters and actually met up a couple of times. Good times.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#317

Post by lxgr »

101008 wrote: post #290
jmbwell wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being reachable only from a PC at home… man. Now that I miss. The whole lifestyle of having a clear distinction between being at the computer and not. Status messages for a time when “away” was a state of being you ever were . Coming back to see whether your crush had messaged you. Simpler times for sure. Before we even had “wi-fi!”

I started writing an essay about this topic. I am one of those nostalgics by the old internet. I thought it was the aesthetic (geocities, etc), but after giving it a lot of thought, that wasn't. It was that your life (all of us) was "offline by default". We lived offline and then we connect to the internet for a few minutes, hours, whatever. But you lived your life offline. We attended concerts, took photos, recorded…

The Internet being an opt-in thing that you'd consciously connect to at a set our of the day, not something that would reach out to you and notify you about all kinds of things at random times, was definitely a different feeling.

Back then, it felt like a parallel world; now it's more like an overlay on this one.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#318

Post by freedomben »

calmworm wrote: post #263
larodi wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4125222 I still remember it but not the pass

666260 Had it for many years then someone “hacked it” and took it. That was the end of it for me.

Yeah I did not realize how much people like to have low number IDs. I signed up very early on but my friends bailed so I did too. No idea what even happened to that account and the email addresses I used at the time are also lost after being abandoned. Given average password sophistication at the time, I'm sure it got hacked/hijacked at some point.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#319

Post by lxgr »

grishka wrote: post #298
lxgr wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have similar sentimental memories of ICQ. One highlight was being able to connect to it from my phone for the first time; first on my first smartphone (Symbian), then from my "non-smart" Sony Ericsson that succeeded it, via some Java Jabber client and a Jabber-to-ICQ bridge! (Unfortunately nobody else that I knew had it on their phones, so I could only reach people in front of their PCs at home.) On the other hand,…

The "proper" way of using ICQ from your phone was Jimm, an unofficial Java client. I was the cool kid with a patched Siemens phone, which could run native apps, so I used NatICQ.elf instead.

Haha, what Siemens phone could you patch to run native apps on? I must have switched to Nokia/Symbian before that became a thing. (That could run both native S60 and J2ME apps – basically infinite apps and games!)

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#320

Post by xp84 »

mindcrime wrote: post #54

Well... 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…

They've been working on other ones. You can set up an AIM server, too.
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