Just a few days ago, ICQ, the founder of the chat software, officially ceased operations.
Presumably, people who have heard or used ICQ are not young anymore, right?
ICQ, known as the world's first instant messaging software, was also a success.
In the past, people used to love online, without QQ, WeChat, ICQ, and some people's first foreign chat partner met there. The classic sound effect of "oh oh", as well as the seven or eight digits of the ICQ number, constitute a lot of youth memories of the post-70s and 80s, as well as a small number of post-90s.
Although the official news of ICQ going offline was announced in May, I didn't expect this day to really come, which is still quite embarrassing.
Many netizens posted to commemorate this "another tear of the times".
Of course, many of our post-00s friends may not be familiar with ICQ.
But if you've heard the sentence in "Gray Avatar" "opened the OICQ chat history and stopped in the late autumn of last year", you should always know that OICQ refers to QQ, right?
This ICQ is the real old-timer of QQ.
Because of its name, Tencent also suffered a lawsuit from ICQ's parent company back then, and later changed its name to QQ, and the matter subsided.
And in addition to QQ, there are other PICQ, TICQ and GICQ, but at the peak of ICQ, it can be said that there is no one.
However, this ancestor is not as smooth as we thought, on the contrary, his career has changed hands twice, and each time it has made ICQ farther and farther away from the altar.
Twenty-eight years ago, four Israeli dudes stumbled upon ICQ version 1.0, which stands for "I Seek You," while tinkering with a startup project.
In ICQ, users can chat in real time with people who are also online.
This feature is certainly not worth mentioning today. But in those days when communication between people had to rely on email and phone calls, this form of free and real-time chat was simply not too advanced.
At first, ICQ developed in some gaming communities and was used by players as a communication tool outside of games.
However, this convenient method of communication soon spread from person to person, and ICQ already had more than 5 million users in the first year of its launch, and another million users every three weeks the following year.
According to CSDN, ICQ once accounted for 80% of the domestic market.
The crazy growth rate made this software, which has been online for less than two years and has no revenue, be collected by AOL for $407 million.
However, according to Shichao's understanding, many brothers were dissatisfied with this acquisition at that time. Because they fear that AOL will turn ICQ into a fee software full of spam ads and viruses.
As a result, they really guessed correctly. After being acquired by AOL, ICQ spent 12 years staging a wave of highs and lows for everyone.
After the new owner, ICQ has launched several versions such as 99a, 99B and 2000b, with many new features such as historical conversation storage, search, emailing and list grouping.
In 2001, the number of ICQ users went straight to 100 million, and the total number of Internet users in the world at that time was only more than 400 million...
But "forced" into the commercial ICQ, the software began to be crammed with all kinds of advertisements, and there were more and more bells and whistles but not very practical features.
另外一边, AIM 、 MSN Messenger 和 Yahoo Messenger 雅虎通这几个竞争对手,也在想法子抢 IM 软件市场。
Especially in China, data show that in 2003, QQ accounted for 74.3% of the domestic IM market, MSN accounted for 11.23% and ranked second, followed by NetEase Bubble, Yahoo Messenger, etc., ICQ only got 1.9% of the territory.
In fact, ICQ is deflated in China, not without reason.
In the first few years of its launch, ICQ's conversations could only be stored on the user's computer. At that time, most people in China basically went to Internet bars, which was equivalent to you changing a computer, and the chat history with your online dating partner was all gone.
And the fact that there is no Chinese version has also laid a mine for it in the domestic market early.
Under the internal and external attacks, ICQ's decline seems to be irreversible.
According to an article titled "ICQ : 20 Years Is No Limit! According to ICQ insiders, from 2007 to 2010, ICQ was pretty much abandoned by AOL.
Time quickly came to ICQ's second turning point in fate.
AOL had to sell ICQ to Russia's Digital Sky Technologies (now VK) for $187 million, less than half of the price it had bought at the time.
Interestingly, Tencent was originally on the list of interested parties to acquire ICQ. If Tencent had taken ICQ down back then, I don't know what kind of situation it would be today.
However, one thing to say, after ICQ was acquired by the second financier, there was indeed a period of resurgence.
Because of the Russian market, there seems to be a lot of affection for ICQ.
At that time, in addition to Tencent, the other two companies that wanted to buy ICQ were Russian companies. According to foreign media, about 18.5 million of ICQ's 42 million active users in 2010 were located in Russia.
And in 2010 on the largest auction site in Russia, the average price of a six-figure ICQ UIN was 1500-2000 rubles. (Converted into RMB at the exchange rate at the time, about 300-400 yuan)
During the VK period, ICQ developed a mobile app, upgraded several versions, and released a lot of new ways to play in line with the trend. According to a 2014 Bloomberg report, ICQ saw its first user growth since its acquisition by VK that year.
In 21 years, when WhatsApp made a fuss about its privacy policy, ICQ was also turned out to be nostalgic.
But tossing and turning, it has not been able to regain the glory of the millennium, and in 2022, ICQ has only 11 million monthly active users.
This offline may already be the last sigh of ICQ, which is mired in the quagmire.
But to be honest, these instant chat apps that came out around the same time as ICQ, ICQ has been alive for a long time. MSN was the first to go, but it was stopped by Microsoft in 2014, and AIM and Yahoo Tune persevered for a few more years, but they couldn't get through it in the end.
Now it's ICQ's turn to teach us a lesson with 28 years of practice: get up early in the morning and catch up with a late meeting.
In this, there are self-made ingredients, and there are also marks that have been run over by the wheels of the times, but no matter what, as the founder of this industry, the significance of ICQ itself is indelible.
And I also noticed that in May, when ICQ officially announced the news of going offline on X, it was accompanied by this intriguing picture:
I don't know if ICQ still has any hole cards hidden?
Written by: Sissy
Editor: Jiang Jiang & Noodle Line
Editor: Xuanxuan
Pictures and sources:
ICQ, Weibo, Xiaohongshu
CSDN, when you use WeChat and QQ, please don't forget about ICQ, this great company!
Dimitry O.Photo ， ICQ : 20 Years Is No Limit!
WIRED ， ICQ Fans Rage Against AOL
cnBeta and AOL selected three finalists for ICQ, including Tencent
WIRED ， Why ICQ is so important to Russia
Ars Technica ， RIP ICQ : Remembering a classic messaging app that was way ahead of its time
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