What Ever Occurred to ICQ?

ICQ, quick for the phrase “I Search You,” laid the groundwork for standalone on the spot messaging purchasers when it arrived in November 1996. Take into consideration how way back that was…

Microsoft’s trailblazing Home windows 95 was barely a yr previous, Nintendo had simply launched the N64, and people with a cause to have a cellphone truly used it to speak on.

Launched after lower than two months of growth from Israeli firm Mirabilis, it predated and influenced most of the fashionable chat packages of the period together with AOL On the spot Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger.

Extremely sufficient, ICQ has additionally outlasted its chief rivals: AIM shut down on the finish of 2017, Yahoo’s communications program bit the bullet in mid-2018 and Microsoft laid its Messenger consumer to relaxation in 2014.

ICQ provided a lot of revolutionary options together with multi-user chat, async offline messaging, resumable file transfers and a searchable listing. Customers have been issued a novel Consumer Identification Quantity, or UIN, upon registration. This quantity (I in some way nonetheless bear in mind mine by coronary heart some 20 years later), together with customized handles and an hooked up electronic mail tackle, have been used to seek for different customers on the platform.

Mirabilis loved first-mover benefit, attracting hundreds of thousands of early Web customers enticed by the proposition of chatting with family and friends in real-time. ICQ’s success additionally captivated potential suitors, prompting AOL to ink a test to the tune of $287 million for the whole lot of Mirabilis’ belongings in 1998. Contingency funds that began in fiscal 2001 reportedly totaled an extra $120 million, pushing the overall worth of the deal over $400 million.

America On-line would handle to develop ICQ’s person base tenfold over the following three years, surpassing greater than 100 million registered customers by the spring of 2001.

The approaching decade would once more reinvent private communication, driving conversations from mouse and keyboard to cell units. AOL should have noticed the writing on the wall because it offloaded ICQ to Russian funding agency Digital Sky Applied sciences (later referred to as Mail.ru Group, now VK) in 2010 for $187.5 million.

Some could also be stunned to study that ICQ remains to be round and is being actively developed. The newest steady launch in desktop was this month (as of February 2022), model 10.0.46581, whereas Android and iOS apps have additionally been just lately up to date. Immediately’s ICQ is a far cry from the fundamental UI of yesteryear, with a contemporary design and acquainted options like safe video calls and stickers. The core performance – the power to talk with family and friends – stays.

In accordance with Mail.ru, the moment messaging platform is utilized by 11 million folks worldwide every month. Positive, it isn’t practically as fashionable because it as soon as was but it surely’s nonetheless round and that is greater than most of its early rivals can say. In case you’re enthusiastic about reconnecting with previous contacts or need to uncover it for the primary time, ICQ is obtainable to obtain for Home windows and Mac in addition to Android and iOS cell units.

In early 2021 when WhatsApp up to date its privateness coverage, a number of customers in Hong Kong ditched the Fb-owned app in favor of a visit down reminiscence lane. Downloads of ICQ jumped 35-fold in that week of 2021, surpassing the overall variety of downloads throughout the complete fourth quarter of 2020.

Picture: Joyu Wang, WSJ

Most likely would not mistake ICQ as a pillar of privateness contemplating it’s owned and operated by VK, the Russian Web companies group previously referred to as Mail.ru Group. However for the curious amongst us, the app remains to be being actively developed and it is cross-platform and out there for many main working techniques.

These anticipating an expertise much like what the unique desktop app delivered will probably be disillusioned as the present model has rather more in frequent with trendy chat apps than classic on the spot messaging purchasers.