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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

#651

Post by throwaway2037 »

h0l0cube wrote: post #648
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 i…

About your last paragraph: The key to me about Facebook, and eventually, Instagram, the visual is simply more powerful to humans than written words. This is why people started chasing fame with good looks as soon as the Internet "went visual".

I had a thought last week: When I was in high school (very early Internet years), older people told me the "popular" people will fade away when you go to university. For most part, in my experience, this was true. I realised last week that visual social media allows "high school popular people" (conventionally attractive, for the most part) to stay that way forever. When you look at most social media influencers, there isn't very much special about them, except them seem like the type of person who was popular in high school. For most normies, that is enough to give them more attention than someone else.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#652

Post by throwaway2037 »

netsharc wrote: post #619
swores wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment you replied to is more accurate, as WhatsApp is huge in multiple continents not just in Europe (just not as big in North America as you both point out). For example it's big in South America (and I think Central America too?)

Asia too. Australia too. So again it's the Fahrenheit users being different... Edit: I looked it up, maybe not Australia...

"Asia too"

Hmm. China? No -- WeChat. Japan? No -- Line. Korea? No -- KaoKao.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#653

Post by HeavyStorm »

ICQ was the best IM to ever exist. It was - at least here - pitifully killed by MSN, a much worse tool that had the advantage to be included in Windows.

I still have to find a tool as good as ICQ was. Of course, there were bugs and I would expect more from it today (I'm thinking of the app back in 2004), like video support, but still, no one bested it UX and features.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#654

Post by throwaway2037 »

LinXitoW wrote: post #601
toast0 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> didn't support offline messages ICQ did support offline messages, from the beginning afaik, too. I had a 6-digit uin (485358 or something similar), until it got banned for running a bot (whoops). To the sibling reply, I think AIM and ICQ did have interop on messages at some point, it was much later than when ICQ moved protocols to OSCAR and TOK though.

245032701. The first number I ever memorized, and likely the only number eternally burned into my mind.

The special number from my childhood is: 007-373-5963

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#656

Post by bayindirh »

Dalewyn wrote: post #603
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, or internet of the people if you prefer the term. That's IRC.

> That's IRC.

IRC is the other one, not the only one. However, Discord is eating its lunch in these days, sadly.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#657

Post by h0l0cube »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #651
h0l0cube wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

About your last paragraph: The key to me about Facebook, and eventually, Instagram, the visual is simply more powerful to humans than written words. This is why people started chasing fame with good looks as soon as the Internet "went visual". I had a thought last week: When I was in high school (very early Internet years), older people told me the "popular" people will fade away when you go to university. For most p…

Well I'd say that Instagram was yet another inflection point, where relationships with strangers returned in parasocial many-to-one form, in place of the one-on-one intimacy afforded by ICQ.

At the time of ICQ, chat programs were the sole means of discovering and connecting to people, and allowed people to connect to strangers based on location. I made real life friends, who I met in person on ICQ. I suppose this kind of connection might still happening on game servers and Discord servers, but certainly, it isn't the dominant mode.

As for Facebook being 'visual': Facebook in it's earlier incarnations was just status updates, and mobile phone cameras were still pretty clunky (or non-existant). Instagram took off because it's filters turned otherwise ugly low-fidelity photos into something appealing.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#659

Post by fweimer »

ewzimm wrote: post #515
mulmen wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is IRC a tiny fraction of what it was? As a percentage of internet traffic sure, but has the population of IRC users actually declined?

I’m pretty sure IRC has continued to grow in obscurity, much like Gopher, which, last I checked, was also at an all-time peak and growing steadily but slowly.

The numbers here https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php are much lower than what I remember from twenty years ago, and the Internet Archive seems to support this: https://web.archive.org/web/20060902133725/http://irc.netspl...

I don't think IRC is one of those technologies whose usage count in absolute terms is at an all-time high today. It wasn't exactly mainstream in the early 2000s, but it still had lots of users.

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