It has been years since they let me use my ultra short ICQ number from the 1990s.
See ya'!
ICQ will stop working from June 26
271–280 of 776 posts
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet, it’ll still be around after Discord shuts down.
But would IRC be what a post-Discord exodus actually goes back to? Lacking basic modern amenities like seamless scrollback and push notifications is going to be a hard sell for the generation that grew up with Discord. As a sibling mentioned, Matrix is closer to the mark.
There is also Zulip, that I think is opensource.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#2731303789 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.
1657721. Yeah. Why do I remember this 25+ years later. I guess you did have to tell someone else the number so they could find you. Maybe that's it?
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#2741303789 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.
889246**
I forgot what I had for lunch yesterday but somehow I can remember my ICQ number.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#275ICQ had a first mover advantage, and lost it. But why?
Being first mover isn't an advantage, mostly.
Atari is dead. Shoutcast is dead. Compuserve and GEnie are long dead, AOL is dead too. Outside of forums like these, nobody knows who made the first personal computers or smartphones, because it doesn't matter to them.
It's a lot easier to build the second insant messaging system than the first because you can see how it works before you build it.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#276664427 - RIP
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#277Hm, I dont' remember it now, it was over 20 years old :).
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#278Muscle memory, do your stuff!
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Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#2791824942
not used in years but very good memories!
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#280Oh man, so many memories... Got ICQ in late 1998, and I remember my UIN as well, suprisingly -- unlike the dozen of mobile phone numbers I had over last 20 years.
Internet back then connected you to people who you'd not meet in everyday life, and ICQ was a new unusual place to discuss anything with them.
It gave you a new view of people you knew. I remember in the last grade at school I had some intimate conversations with a female classmate, which I couldn't imagine doing at school in front of many eyes.
It was a dating and meeting app too: rando people would write to other random people. Although these talks were superficial and today I'd see them disenchanting, back then it was an interesting alternatives to offline sociality.
A recall from 2003: me and sister having desktop computers, chatting with all the people on neighborhood LAN and sometimes messaging each other over ICQ -- too busy to walk to the next room and speak.
Then I used it at office work, mostly to appoint dates with girls from another department. At the time, in 2007, it wasn't exclusive anymore, but like a mark of being web-literate, and girls were easier about telling you a UIN rather than a phone.
Then social networks came, and even before mobile integration they were much richer -- all the life went there. Ah, good old days -- make a party, do stupid contests, take photos with a soapbox digital camera, and then pour the entire SD card in the meeting album -- no editing, no removal of closed or red eyed faces, or weird postures or opened mouths. Just let everyone see how fooly they were. And what was different from ICQ was that everybody was aware that everybody was aware. ICQ had no chance, LOL. (edit: And there was Skype too.)
The last time I opened it under Pidgin on Ubuntu in 2010-2011.