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Ask HN : What killed ICQ?

18 points by dan_sim ↗ HN
When I was young, I used ICQ and it was the coolest thing ever. One day, it was gone and now, it's often remembered in a sarcastic way.

I was too young to care/remember so I'm asking you : What killed ICQ?

55 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] thread
dan_sim
All I remember is that one day, it was all ICQ and the next day, it was all MSN.
jm4
I think it was a combination of things. If I remember correctly, AIM was an AOL subscription exclusive in the beginning so only the dopes on there were using it. The cool kids were on ICQ and I think there were very few AOL users willing or able to use a separate chat client.

Anyway, AOL eventually opened up AIM to everyone and people started using it. It was easier. AIM used screennames. ICQ was cool because you could use any name you wanted but the actual user id was an 8 or 9 digit number (mine was 36915037- not sure why I remember that). It was a total pain in the ass when you wanted to add people to your friend list. Plus, on ICQ you had to receive approval from a user to add them to your buddy list and on AIM you could just add people. Sometimes, you'd sit there in pending approval purgatory wondering if you added the right person with those crazy user id's. AIM was just plain easier.

ICQ had more features and more users, but it was just easier for a lot of them to use AIM so they could chat with their dopey friends who were still using AOL. Meanwhile, AIM was updated with new features frequently and marketed heavily. ICQ still remained relatively popular, but they really sat on their asses over there. After a while AIM caught up and even experimented with video and voice chat while ICQ stayed the same for years.

Eventually, AOL purchased ICQ and basically put it out to pasture. Still, it managed to stick around for a long time. I'm not sure they were expecting that. It's the technology that just won't die.

dan_sim
Great! I thought that MSN being shipped with Windows was really the big problem for ICQ.

By the way, I know 1 or 2 people that still remember their ICQ number... that's odd but it proves how deep ICQ was in their heart.

siong1987
I know why you remember that. Because you have a "eight" digit ICQ number. People at that time used to think that shorter ICQ ID was cooler.
pavel_lishin
5540905.

Can't believe I remembered that. It sort of rhymes in my head.

compay
Ooohhh... 7 digits: 6980539

I signed up in 1997 or 1998... haven't used it for anything in a LONG time.

alexkay
6 digits and still using it: 666778 ;-P
cnu
missed by 1?
walesmd
1170403 - no idea why I remember that, haven't used ICQ since the days of Quake Team Fortress.
dan_sim
If everyone that still remember their number would do a "forget password" and add their account to Pidjin (or whatever), maybe they could find long forgotten friends. The problem is that they will see the last cool name they gave to themselves (something like ---~~~ dARk eviL MaGICian ~~~---)
alex_c
I remember my number too... I once typed it in on an assignment instead of my student number. D'oh.
transburgh
It was the opposite where I grew up. AOL was the cool kids and ICQ were the dopes. Hence ICQ falling away.
nx
The numbers.
dan_sim
Yeah! When I wrote the Ask HN, I totally forgot about it. But now that I remember, it hurts!
Jasber
I thought the numbers were one of the things that made it fun. Having a low ICQ number showed you were an early adopter, much like having a short URL or twitter name.
andrewljohnson
Yeah, it made it fun for the early adopters, and less fun for everyone else. That's not much of a strategy, considering how few early adopters there are.
mseebach
Yeah, fun for the million or so first users, not so much for the next 2 billion.

I specifically remember hating those numbers (because I always forgot mine) and being spitefully relieved to switch to MSN Messenger when that came out.

there
just like giving out an old compuserve e-mail address.
seraph321
yeah, it was all those 0's and 1's. They were in the wrong order!
wlievens
I actually liked the numbers, even remembered mine years after stopping to use ICQ.
vasudeva
Mine was 299961. I still remember it despite having forgotten the password several lifetimes ago.
dan_sim
So many people remember their ICQ number, it's frightening. Do they remember their phone number at that time?
pavel_lishin
I remember my number, but not any of my old phone numbers or addresses. Sometimes I forget my own birthday.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
yan
I just typed mine up without thinking about it after not knowing what it was for a while. Nice to know again :)
rsayers
I stopped using it because nearly everyone I knew switched to AIM which I also did eventually.

As common as IM is now, I recall being amazed at the concept of not having to sit on IRC all day to talk to my friends.

And just to brag, my number was 522621

mixmax
Two things killed ICQ

1) Usability - when you do a product for the masses usability and simlicity matters a lot.

2) Marketing - when you're up against Microsoft and AOL you are in trouble unless you have an excellent product (see point 1)

There's a good lesson to be learnt here for entrepreneurs.

dan_sim
What I learn : it's not because you're the first player in a field AND used widespead that your product will live forever.
guruz
As a German, I would not call it killed. It's very poplar here.

But I think most of my friends use things like Miranda or Gaim/Pidgin and not the bloat-client. Even the lesser tech-savy ones. They got it installed by the nerds ;)

raquo
In Russia too, ICQ is the dominant IM protocol. Many geeks use jabber though (together with ICQ).

And Livejournal is the dominant blog platform. I guess the network effect (resulting from being first to market?) has something to do with it.

And, BTW - 282192658. And I used to remember my first cell phone number too for a long time. That's probably because it was so cool to be able to chat / call for the first time.

gmcerveny
The default audible keyboard...
dan_sim
Now I remember... all the sounds were ON by default. The "oh-oh" everytime someone sent you a message... so agressing...
mattmichielsen
I'm totally going to set that as all the default windows sounds on my coworker's computer who used to be my ICQ contact years ago.
zandorg
I made that my sound in Trillian too. Except, I had to edit it in audio editor Cooledit to compress it, etc.
dennmart
I stopped using ICQ when it started to get way too slow for my computer at the time. I remember the first versions were snappy and quick, then they started adding more and more stuff, and it got too bloated for me. ICQ Lite was too stripped down for me, so I looked for alternatives.

Also, all my friends were jumping on the MSN bandwagon (mostly due to MSN being bundled with Windows), so if I wanted to chat with them, I had to jump along with them. Peer pressure can be a bitch sometimes.

seraph321
Just figured I'd mention that ICQ never died for me and mine. It was the first IM service I joined (I still use my original 6-digit UIN), and I just never understood why I should change to MSN or any of the others. I long ago started using all-in-one clients so I could talk to people on MSN, AIM, Google, etc but my core group of friends never saw a reason to leave ICQ's network. ICQ actually had a ton of features no one else did for quite a while. The big one for me: it always saved your chat history (and I love to go back and look at my conversations from ten years ago), while MSN and AIM didn't do this at first.

As I type this, I have MirandaIM open and 5 of my close friends going back 8 years are online via ICQ. I will consider it a great shame if it ever really dies.

mrtron
A.O.L.

(what killed mapquest? netscape? ...)

Truk
I still log into both my AIM acct and my 6 digit ICQ acct. I have no friends on ICQ any more, but I refuse to let it go.
chops
About 3 years ago, my 6-digit ICQ number got hijacked without any way of getting it back (I had created it with a geocities.com email address). That was when I stopped using it.
guruz
Funny. Maybe about two years ago, I could not login to my "first" ICQ account either. Never knew why that happened.

Also, none of my buddies complained about getting weird messages from that account. Was that the case with your account?

chops
My friends has simply notified me that my account was hijacked, as I rarely actually logged in anymore. My friends said that they would IM my account, and get a response either in russian, or in very broken English, informing them that this is a russian now.

Upon which they called me to ask if I was pretending to be russian.

volida
- Windows MSN Messenger - Network effects - Hesitation to adapt the product
fimblo
their gawd-ugly homepage.
compay
ICQ is still very widely used among people in the internet porn business.
nir
I think it was mostly multi-protocol clients, which are not limited to one network, and products that one-upped IM like Skype or gTalk. Other than that, is ICQ more dead than MSN messenger or Yahoo's IM or AIM?
kschua
Hi, this is my first post here. Couldn't resist it when people were rattling off their ICQ number. Mine's 1010378.
tanco
MSN Messenger pre-installed in Windows.