I really liked the design of the underlying protocol (OSCAR, also used by AIM). It was a lot of fun to implement in a 3rd party client and I learned so much about networking and application protocols from the experience. It contributed immensely my career path.
It was my first introduction to the type-length-value concept over the network, seemed radically different from the text only IRC protocol that I knew back then. I remember how fun it was to write an elegant parser for the ICQ messaging, and how I ended up on somewhat a DOM model where I converted the on-wire format into series of nested objects. Not the most efficient idea, but it was neat.
Out of everything we have today, Discord is arguably the best we've got.
Nobody cares about Skype anymore as much. VK Messenger, which is ICQ's successor, looks like trash. Telegram used to be very great but did take some morally questionable steps, yet still gives the user an awful lot of power. Zoom is garbage. Microsoft Teams is garbage. Facebook Messenger is garbage.
So if I had to pick, Discord and Telegram is the best we've got now.
Nooooooo. I can't remember my ICQ, maybe I still have it somewhere, but this is still sad.
At least IRC is still going.
Edit:
In its heyday, ICQ boasted over 100 million users on its platform, which was a remarkable achievement at the time. In 2010, ICQ was purchased by Mail.ru (now VK), who has since owned the products as it declined in use.
Today, ICQ announced that they are shutting down on June 26th, recommending that users switch to VK Messenger and Workspace.
I can almost breath the same as young me getting home, throwing my bag in my bed and jumping to the family PC in the living room to chat with friends.
Man, I never thought I'd miss the 00's. Why'd I wanna grow up?
One thing those old ones did was have conversations in their own windows. I much prefer that over having to navigate back and forth in the same damn window to jump between convos.
Man and with the way they’re built today, there’s probably no hotkey that e.g. Alfred or Keyboard Maestro could help you press to navigate between conversations. Though I wouldn’t be surprised to find I’m wrong and that somebody’s figured out workarounds.
