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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

#641

Post by lproven »

guerrilla wrote: post #610
lproven wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try Ferdium, RAMbox, or Station. All FOSS. https://ferdium.org/ https://rambox.app/ https://getstation.com/

These all suck comapred to Pidgen. Pidgen was one UI. This is just a bunch of webapps shoved into the same window/app and it's ugly and awkward as all fuck to use.

Yes, agreed.

But it's still a lot better than 5, 6, 10 different apps.

Also, it's "Pidgin", as in "pidgin English."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin

It's a word, not a weird made-up name.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#642

Post by DEADMINCE »

silisili wrote: post #193
verst wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

219431446 was me :D. No idea why I still remember that.

22861316 Tried to login a few years back to see if any of my old Quake buddies happened to still use it, but couldn't. Support said unless I had the recovery email still, which was at bigfoot.com which has been dead for decades, I was out of luck.

You just have to buy out the company that owns the domain so you can set it up with your former email. Easy.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#643

Post by Braini »

kazinator wrote: post #599
bayindirh wrote: post #506

Earlier 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.

> ICQ was the chat tool of the democratic internet It was proprietary client software released in 1996 and bought by AOL two years later. It relies on a service operated by a single party, which is now sunsetting it. According to the Wikipedia article, when ICQ was under AOL's stewardship, "AOL pursued an aggressive policy regarding alternative ("unauthorized") ICQ clients." The article details all the tactics that A…

That is correct but it was still more open than what we have now with the current services. 3rd party clients and multi-protocol messengers we don't have at all anymore.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#644

Post by _blk »

rsiqueira wrote: post #545
RajT88 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First thought: I had assumed ICQ was long dead. It seemed impossible anything from that era could still be running. IRC is of course, through the grace of an ecosystem, but it is a tiny fraction of what it was. Second thought: how do people randomly connect to talk now? Comments sections mostly? I have long ago stopped seeking new connections of any variety.

In one of those random connections, I met my wife through ICQ.

Nice. I just remembered my 8 digit login and password and indeed, my wife also had an account back somewhere in 2005-2008. (I brought here there but didn't meet her there though)

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#645

Post by whearyou »

bayindirh wrote: post #506
dkga wrote: post #470

I 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…

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.

One of the last living artifacts of the internet that was, the internet that could have been.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#646

Post by anonzzzies »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #592
dkga wrote: post #470

I 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…

Wasn't icq the client where to send messages, you had to use alt+i? That alone was the worst possible ux choice for a chat client

Wat?

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#647

Post by prmoustache »

sourcecodeplz wrote: post #526
dkga wrote: post #470

I 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…

ICQ was nice but everyone moved on to Yahoo Messenger. That was the bomb. Truly unbelievable Yahoo didn't capitalize on that. Everyone used it.

It was MSN messenger that came preinstalled with any new pc that slowly killed it, because a lot of people got their first computer in that period and thus only knew the Microsoft one. ICQ users slowly started to have a secondary MSN Messenger account (the days of Trillian) but that was it, once people have 2 messengers apps AND most of their friends are on the new one, they just slowly abandonned the one with less contacts.

I personnally didn't even knew there was a Yahoo issued Messenger until this comment.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#648

Post by h0l0cube »

dkga wrote: post #470

I 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…

> Most people don’t get it when I say this, maybe someone here will, but to me it all started going downhill when people all of a sudden switched to a worse alternative, MSN.

It wasn't so much the platform that set ICQ apart, it was the time in which it was born into. In the late 90s and early 00s, the internet was still an unchartered 'No Man's Land'. Internet access was difficult and scarce, and people approached it with curiosity and savor. Now the internet is taken for granted, and anonymously connecting to strangers so unremarkable, that it is seen as an excess that can be squandered in mindless and fleeting argument and opposition.

If there was an inflection point, I'd say it was around the nascent rise of Facebook. Connecting to familiars became the default, and also enough, that connecting to strangers didn't hold as much allure as competing to make your life look more appealing within your peer group.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#649

Post by scooke »

kazinator wrote: post #599
bayindirh wrote: post #506

Earlier 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.

> ICQ was the chat tool of the democratic internet It was proprietary client software released in 1996 and bought by AOL two years later. It relies on a service operated by a single party, which is now sunsetting it. According to the Wikipedia article, when ICQ was under AOL's stewardship, "AOL pursued an aggressive policy regarding alternative ("unauthorized") ICQ clients." The article details all the tactics that A…

You missed the point. The point wasn't the nature of the tool itself. Anyone could join, and one could chat with anyone. It was used "by the people" and not curated by corps.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#650

Post by AshamedCaptain »

nogridbag wrote: post #432
fragmede wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you reminded me that we used to pay for Internet access by the hour. You'd pay $X for one hour of Internet use, so you'd go online, do a thing and then disconnect to save money. local vs remote for email was such a different time. you'd have a fat client on your laptop, and you'd do a bunch of writing offline, before connecting, having the program sync, and then disconnect. how times have changed!

I still feel bad I left my parents' computer online all night to download a .wav (?) audio file of Mario jumping from Nintendo.com. Back then, the closest most kids got to Nintendo was via video game magazines. So going to Nintendo.com for the first time and downloading an audio file was a special moment. The download was taking hours and I have no idea how much it cost my parents. I just remember being so disappoint…

You may be confusing things. By the time nintendo.com had a website, they were aready oferring small trailers in .mov (cuts from the stuff they would ship in vhs). A wav would have been very quick to download; a couple second QuickTime file -- not so much.
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