ICQ

» see icq.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

ICQ launched on 15 november 1996, made by four israeli developers in tel aviv at a small company called mirabilis. the name was a phonetic spelling of "i seek you." it was the first widely-used consumer instant messenger. before icq, internet chat was IRC for nerds and AOL chat rooms for everyone else. icq was the first thing that put one-on-one private messaging in regular people's hands.

in turkey i remember icq from around 1999 to 2001. before MSN took over here, icq was the way you talked to friends online. the uh-oh sound was the notification. the 6-digit numbers were the early-adopter flex. mine had 8 digits because i joined late. people who had 6-digit numbers would write them on their school notebooks the way you would write a phone number, and other kids would copy them.

AOL bought icq in 1998 for about 407 million dollars. for a few years it was an AOL property. mail.ru bought it from AOL in 2010 for 187 million dollars. mail.ru ran it as a russian-market product for the next decade. in may 2024 they announced the shutdown. on 26 june 2024 the servers went offline. 28 years.

~ the record ~

~ the number ~

your icq identity was a number, not a username. early adopters had short ones, six digits, sometimes five, very rarely four. the number was a status symbol. people paid real money on ebay for low-numbered icq accounts. having a 5-digit number meant you had been online since 1997. having an 8-digit number, like i did, meant you joined later.

the format was a leftover from the original mainframe days, similar to compuserve's numeric IDs. icq did not really try to make it human-friendly until the late 2000s, when they finally added the option to log in with email. by then most people had already moved to MSN. the numbers were what people remembered icq for.

~ the uh-oh ~

the icq notification sound was a male voice saying "uh-oh." it played every time a message arrived. for the half-decade icq was popular, this sound was the universal "you have a new message" signal. you would hear it across rooms in internet kafes. you would hear it from someone else's computer at a party.

people my age in turkey, and across most of the world, can still imitate the uh-oh from memory. it is one of those audio artifacts that becomes part of your brain in your teenage years and never leaves. it is in the same memory bracket as the windows 95 startup sound, the dial-up handshake, and the original nokia ringtone.

~ the flower ~

the contact-status icon in icq was a small flower. green flower meant online. red flower meant offline or do-not-disturb. yellow flower was free-for-chat. there was a special icon for invisible mode. watching your contacts' flowers bloom and wilt across the day was an early form of presence-awareness, before facebook had a "online now" thing.

icq also had a status message field above the contact list, where you could write a sentence about how you were feeling. people used this in the same way later turkish kids would use their MSN display names: cryptic song lyrics aimed at one specific person, mood announcements, quotes from movies. it was the same channel of public-private communication, just with smaller text.

~ the slow death ~

MSN started eating icq's audience around 2001 in europe and most of the world. icq users migrated steadily through 2002 to 2004. by 2005 most people who used icq still had it as a backup contact list, while their daily messenger was MSN. by 2010 the russian-speaking world was the only big icq market left, and mail.ru's purchase reflected that.

the smartphone era killed what was left. whatsapp launched in 2009. by 2013 icq's mobile presence was a small app very few people used. mail.ru kept it running for the russian market until they decided in 2024 that even there it was not worth the costs. the announcement came in may. the shutdown came in june.

~ what we lost ~

the numeric id as a real form of identity. icq was the only consumer messenger where your identity was a number. it had a strange permanence to it. you could remember someone's icq number ten years after you stopped talking to them. modern usernames are weaker than that. they change. icq numbers did not.

the uh-oh sound. nothing in modern apps has the same audio impact. notifications now are gentle chirps designed to not disturb you. icq's uh-oh was loud and slightly accusatory. it was demanding your attention. that was the whole point.

the era. icq was the first messenger that mattered for most of the world outside north america. the late-90s phase, when the whole concept of "instant message a friend across the world" was new, was an icq phase. people who were online then remember icq. people who got online later mostly do not. that gap is now permanent.

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