“That is how they killed ICQ,” stated the servant to Mr. Švejk, who, having left it a few years in the past, had no concept that it was nonetheless working.
It’s so. On June 26, 2024, someday within the afternoon of Central European Summer time Time, the ICQ communicator, one of many first widespread on-line chats ever, ceased to exist after greater than 27 years of its existence. Folks wrote loads about it, very often in pseudo-funny type posts „Consumer XXXYYYZZZ has simply logged out of ICQ”, which have been speculated to show that even after a number of a long time, they may dump their ICQ UIN out of their heads. It’s fairly vital, nevertheless, that customers wrote this message wherever else, besides on ICQ.
Supply: DIIT
A lot has been written in regards to the historical past of ICQ that it is not sensible to dedicate greater than a paragraph or two to it. The writer is the Israeli firm Mirabilis, which wrote the phrase “I Search You” in three letters and launched a program designed for textual content communication between customers on the finish of 1996. Every consumer obtained his distinctive quantity (UIN) upon registration, the very first customers who principally examined the shopper earlier than the sharp launch had four-digit numbers (they have been later renumbered to six-digit numbers beginning with 77), sharp operation began with the quantity 10000 and subsequently the UIN was used to measure what who ever arrived on the platform. It was a extremely easy program for the primary few years – till the model launched in 2001, it could not even retailer contacts on the server, so if you arrived at a brand new laptop, you needed to re-enter all of the individuals (or carry the ICQ information recordsdata with you on a floppy ).
Nevertheless, by that point it had already been owned by AOL for a number of years, which purchased it together with all of Mirabilis, invested massively in its growth and, in fact, needed to get these investments again. In 2002, it obtained a patent for your entire know-how, and at the moment, the expansion of promoting content material within the shopper additionally started, various purchasers flourished, and AOL fiercely fought towards them. Within the following years, customers started to maneuver elsewhere – to Skype, to Jabber, later to Fb, Google Discuss, WhatsApp, however you your self have definitely moved elsewhere, so there is no such thing as a have to elaborate. Due to this fact, in 2010, AOL offered your entire platform to the Russian firm Mail.Ru, which rapidly began engaged on cell purchasers, however didn’t cease the autumn – it solely slowed it down for fourteen years. If in its heyday (2001) ICQ had over 100 million registered customers who often used the appliance, then when it was offered to Russia, the variety of customers didn’t exceed 42 million per day, and the 12 months earlier than final it was not even a hundredth of this quantity.
So it is shocking that it nonetheless existed till yesterday afternoon, particularly after ICQ dropped help for the unique OSCAR protocol a number of years in the past and switched to the brand new WIM. Though it introduced conveniences recognized from elsewhere comparable to group chats, dialog historical past saved on the server, affirmation of studying a message or logging in by e-mail as a substitute of a quantity, it additionally reduce off dozens of purchasers that have been created within the earlier twenty years of existence on varied platforms, from pocket Java MIDP on push-button telephones to fully edge desktop techniques.
Supply: DIIT
Truly, no person regretted the tip of ICQ within the sense that they actively used it and had no various. ICQ was the primary chat that was widespread sufficient that the UIN was used as an everyday contact, it was no downside to order a laptop computer within the bazaar through ICQ, reply to an advert through it or ask in regards to the opening hours of a pub. Whenever you wrote to somebody who was offline, the message reached him the second he linked, which was removed from a given – if somebody was not linked to IRC (most likely the most important chat platform earlier than ICQ), then you definitely merely didn’t write to him. After I have a look at my 18-year-old contact checklist, I do not even know who they have been, how I knew them and why we wrote to one another for a great two-thirds of them – a few of my contacts at the moment have been merely one-time communications, similar to I’ve dozens in my cell phone cellphone numbers to which I a couple of times despatched an SMS or made a name.
I deserted ICQ as such in 2007 and switched to XMPP/Jabber within the silly hope that everybody else would quickly observe go well with, as a result of the advantages are clear. So my contact checklist dropped from three digits to 2 digits, I had ICQ linked utilizing the transport for a number of years, however once I discovered that just about nobody was there anyway, I ended utilizing it fully. The contacts I did not need to lose, I am now chasing in 5 or 6 different communication applications and social networks, and I am nonetheless taming it, as a result of at the very least 5 extra are in common use.
Supply: DIIT
So, what might be regretted with the tip of ICQ is one thing that truly ended a very long time in the past – the time of 1 man, on which nearly everybody could possibly be discovered. That program has been horrible for some time and horribly filled with promoting. The protocol was binary, proprietary and proprietary. The license phrases have been nugatory. For virtually half of ICQ’s existence, it was owned by a doubtful Jap proprietor. However once I needed to put in writing to somebody in 2003 that we might exit for a beer, all I needed to do was open ICQ and I used to be certain that I’d discover him there. Now, I am largely solely assured with easy SMS, and that is only a step backwards even towards ICQ.
