UHOH!
ICQ will stop working from June 26
531–540 of 776 posts
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#532Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Yeah, the random chats were definitely the highlight. I recall a level of discourse considerably higher than what you commonly find on eg. Omegle now (or 5 years ago or whenever I last used it, anyway).
Well, Omegle doesn't exist anymore, so that's a true statement anyhow.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
AOL had 'AOL Quick Buddy', a Java applet client and later AIM Express that used Adobe Flash. I definitely used quick buddy from computers at my junior college (98-2000), but I don't remember using AIM express.
Ah, I never used AIM directly. Maybe that would have worked with ICQ too, though? In any case, Meebo worked using the (back then) advanced, exciting magic of AJAX :)
I think it did at some point, but I think it was quite a few years after ICQ was purchased before the infrastructure merged.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#534Earlier 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,…
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!”
> Coming back to see whether your crush had messaged you.
Reminds me of personal experience of course but also the "Less Than Three" video [0], which in turn reminds me of the GUNSHIP Art3mis & Parzival music video [1]. I'll probably never watch the Ready Player One movie again, but I'll likely watch the GUNSHIP video another 100x.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#535Oh ho!
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#536I'm 467533, managed to remember my password -- haven't used ICQ in >20 years. I'll pop online periodically from now until the shut down. Say hi!
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You also had digital freedom and autonomy. You controlled how many ICQ accounts you had. Setting one up took a minute and cost nothing. You chose the client you used to connect with. Noobs used the official ICQ adware and you used some 1337 open source client on Linux that could handle both ICQ and Jabber. But you could talk to them on the same platform. Where are the alternative WhatsApp clients? Or iMessage? Or Tel…
It was a good era where when ICQ added too many ads and features to the 99a client, I was able to switch to an alternatives like Miranda IM and they didn't make any attempts to block the alternate clients.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#538I will forever treasure my ICQ memories. The sounds it made. The moving image when it was connecting. Listening in Winamp to one of only a few dozen possible songs that I had carefully downloaded. Being able to randomly connect to people you would filter. Yes, I want to talk to someone more or less my age but in Iceland. Or any other country. But most of all, the feeling of being connected. As a teenager in the autis…
to me it all started going downhill when people all of a sudden switched to a worse alternative, MSN
I get it, and wholly agree.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#539Has anyone made a patch or proxy to keep this alive by redirecting the client to their own rogue server? Could entice me to reinstall the software and come back.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#540Earlier quoted context omitted.
ICQ was the chat tool of the democratic internet, or internet of the people if you prefer the term. After companies started dominating the internet, it was never be the same. We thought that any company would play by our rules, but they poisoned us with their research, gamification, single way information flow, and walled gardens. This is why I moved to small web. I miss the old internet dearly.
Can you share more on what you mean by moving to the small web?
Google is your friend:
https://benhoyt.com/writings/the-small-web-is-beautiful/
https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/
https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
Another related term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IndieWeb
see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) (NOT web, but similar in spirit - an extended "Gopher"-like protocol)