QIP

» see qip.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

qip lived on the russian-speaking side of the multi-protocol instant messenger window, which is a category i was close to without ever using qip itself. in the 2002-2010 turkish window the third-party multi-protocol client people would name was trillian or pidgin or miranda. qip was the same kind of tool with the same use case, an icq-compatible client that did not show ads in the window, but its install base sat almost entirely inside the russian-language internet.

the first build shipped on november 1 2005 from ilgam zyulkorneev, written for windows, distributed as closed-source freeware. the initial pitch was simple: icq without the official aol client's banner ads. tabbed message windows, an expanded emoticon library, lighter memory footprint. the russian-speaking icq cohort was one of the largest in the world by then, partly because uin-trading and uin-stealing had become a small economy of its own on the cis side, and a no-ad alternative client moved fast through that network.

rbc media group bought qip in 2008 and folded the product into its portal. by 2009 rbc was naming qip its most popular service. later builds added xmpp for jabber and google talk, oscar for aim, ximss for communigate pro, mail.ru agent compatibility, and irc. the final stable release was qip 2012 build 4.0 on march 5 2014. nothing official shipped after that. the wikipedia article still carried a needs-to-be-updated banner from july 2014 a decade later.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

the place qip fit was a specific moment in messenger history. official clients had become bloated with ads and bundled toolbars. multi-protocol third-party clients existed for users who wanted to merge contact lists across icq, msn, aim, and jabber. trillian and pidgin held the english-speaking market. qip held the russian-speaking one, with skinning and customisation that the english tools either did not have or hid behind plugins.

~ the cracks ~

two things drained qip at the same time. icq's own ownership changed in 2010 when aol sold it to digital sky technologies (mail.ru), and the protocol layer started getting tightened against third-party clients in ways that made each new official icq update break older qip builds. meanwhile the messenger center of gravity moved off the windows desktop entirely. skype was already dominant on cross-platform pc chat. whatsapp and viber were moving the russian-speaking world toward phone-based messengers. mail.ru had its own first-party agent that the parent group pushed instead.

~ what got buried with it ~

the march 2014 stop was administrative rather than dramatic. the team simply stopped releasing updates. the website stayed up for years afterward with the old installers still downloadable. the multi-protocol windows-desktop messenger category had no real successor on any platform after the phone era. qip is one of the canonical entries in that frozen tier, along with trillian and pidgin and miranda im, where the build is still on disk somewhere but the protocols it once spoke have either died or moved out of reach.

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