ICQ had a first mover advantage, and lost it. But why?
ICQ will stop working from June 26
211–220 of 776 posts
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#212This 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
500122
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#213I freaked my girlfriend out once because I had my (desktop, a large tower!) computer connected to my stereo. I had left for some reason and there was no music playing, but ICQ would play a little knocking sound when someone logged in. She had heard it three times from the living room, scanned every door and window to find out who was knocking :-)
Fun forgetting your speakers were cranked and getting a message. "
Uh oh!" waking up the whole house.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#214I 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.
Strictly speaking, sequential numbers can scale infinitely, so not the worst way to handle it.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#215Official ICQ client got bloated for every release. Security issues and lots of spam. Miranda IM, open source plugin based architecture, was the best client for ICQ. There was a fun plugin that notified you if anyone read your away message. Good trolling potential.
I remember when Pidgin was my defacto chat app because it had all of the platforms and none of the bloat.
and it's brother Adium on OS X.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#216ICQ still WORKED? Wow. I liked it but the problem was that it didn't have contact list sync, server-based scrollback and other mod cons. And of course that they totally screwed it up with adware.
They repurposed it into a Telegram clone a few years ago, they even had nearly the same bot API and you could import stickers. The desktop client is also a near copycat. It was called "ICQ New"
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#217I had no idea that ICQ was still around, but now I'm sad; end of an era. I was more of an AIM guy than ICQ, but I had a tendency to bother creators on Newgrounds, some of which would leave their ICQ numbers, so I would use it occasionally.
There are obvious advantages to newer IM/texting clients, but these old ones were a pretty vital part of my teenage years. The main reason I learned how to type properly was so I could communicate with my friends better on AIM. I spent way too much time figuring out how to use alternative IM clients like Trillian and gAIM so I could avoid advertisements, I spent a lot of time customizing my AIM profile and playing with different fonts, and having friends spam mean with "chain messages". I loved seeing creators from NewGrounds sign on at 4am and still be willing to talk to me.
I'd be a very different person today without AIM and ICQ, for better or worse.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#218Well... 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.
perfect HN comment, no notes
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#2191303789 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.
I agree with the suggestion that people just don't commit as many things to memory anymore, but that doesn't explain why we still remember certain random numbers from so long ago, while forgetting others. I can instantly recall my ICQ number, but there are plenty of old friends' phone numbers I've forgotten, and those were people I called multiple times a week for years.
Here's a free hypothesis: Maybe it was important to remember your ICQ number. Without it, your message history and contact list was out of reach. In that sense, it fits in the same mental space as a password. What I mean is, there was a cost to losing it. So, you were incentivized to commit it to memory in a way that you weren't with many other numbers.
In contrast, while it would be inconvenient to forget a friend's phone number if you wanted to chat with them, at least you had options. You could generally look them up in the white pages, or call a another friend and get their number, or just ask them when you saw that person again at school the next day.
So, the cost for not remembering a phone number was lower than the cost for not remembering your own ICQ number, and this probably made it mentally stickier.
... Another possibility is a confirmation bias. Maybe we're just not hearing from the 95% of ICQ users who can't remember their number.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#220I met my first girlfriend on icq