WebQQ

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

~ the last words ~

The problem WebQQ existed to solve is one i knew well from the wrong side of the world. Between 2002 and 2005 a lot of my messaging happened in Turkish internet cafes, on machines rented by the hour, where you could not install anything and would not have wanted to leave anything behind if you could. The answer there was MSN, and when the machine did not have MSN on it, the answer was MSN in a browser window. Nobody in an Ankara cafe had heard of QQ.

WebQQ came online in september 2009. Tencent built it for users who could not sign in through the desktop client, which in China meant school computer rooms and the enormous internet cafe economy. QQ by then was the default identity of the Chinese internet, a number rather than a name, and this was the version of it that needed nothing except a browser.

It did not stay small. The page grew a desktop of its own, and before Tencent started cutting things away it had accumulated a digital pet and a game center inside one browser tab. In 2014 all of that came out along with the music streaming, leaving plain messaging under a new name, SmartQQ, aimed now at office workers who wanted chat without the rest of it. That rebuild did not take.

Tencent announced the closure on 13 december 2018 and switched WebQQ off on 1 january 2019. The official line was business restructuring. A source inside the company told Beijing News something blunter, that the product had reached the end of its lifecycle and did not have many users anymore.

~ the record ~

~ what it was for ~

Instant messaging in the 2000s assumed you owned the computer. Every client wanted to be installed and to start with the machine, keeping your history on the local disk where you could find it later, and for a large part of the world none of that was available. Meebo and MSN Web Messenger existed for the same reason WebQQ did, which is that the computer in front of you was frequently not yours.

The browser tab was the whole product. You opened it and signed in, and when you closed it nothing stayed behind. That is a security model and a social model at once, and it fit the shared machine exactly.

~ the long slide ~

WeChat launched in 2011 and by 2018 carried 1.08 billion monthly users. QQ's own number had been falling since the second quarter of 2016 and stood at 803 million in 2018, down 4.8 percent year on year, which is still an enormous figure and still a decline. QQ itself survived by becoming a teenager's app on a phone. WebQQ had nowhere equivalent to retreat to.

The deeper problem was that the shared machine stopped being where people were. A phone is a computer nobody else signs into, always on, in a pocket. Every reason to build a browser client evaporated at once, and Tencent had told people years earlier that the web version would eventually close.

~ the day it died ~

On 1 january 2019 the login page returned a shutdown notice, and Chinese social media filled with people in their late twenties and thirties writing about school. One of them put it as plainly as anyone could: that is what got me through high school computer classes.

It is a specific kind of grief and it is not really about the software. WebQQ was where you went when the machine was borrowed and the bell was about to go. The product was a browser tab. The memory is the room.

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