R.I.P. ICQ

I’m writing this a bit late since ICQ shut down On June 26 2024, yet I have to. ICQ was a phenomenon here and I miss that time, because everybody had ICQ. But it was also frustrating time, because sometimes it was hard to use unofficial clients. I had to boot to Windows to play games on ICQ.

Nowadays connections to people are much more fragmented than ICQ or telephone. Also these days communication platforms are more predatory than before, as far as I know ICQ took money from investors first and then moved to ads in an official client as Mirabilis, then AOL bought is for some reason, maybe to get a protocol or they were just rich and didn’t want to miss a train like with AI this year. Later mail.ru bought it, but long after almost everybody left here in CZ/SK. Now they are moving users to VK Messenger (VK = VKontakte, “(being) in contact”).

But yes, maybe they sold data, messages, spied on interesting topics. After all Mirabilis was an Israeli company and AOL is American company. We were shown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM. Messages weren’t encrypted end-to-end. Actually even web wasn’t encrypted that much except maybe login to an account. It is a bit ironic that most people switched to Facebook (Messenger) and Gtalk. And I wasn’t against it as it supported connections through XMPP. At first. Until they didn’t. Personally I moved to Facebook, but also had Gmail account with GTalk bar. Surprisingly I still remember two out of my three ICQ numbers.