One of the oldest online platforms still operating is finally shutting down after 27 years: once-popular instant messaging service ICQ announced via its website on Friday that it will shut down its service next month.
“ICQ will stop working starting June 26th,” the message reads. Translation company“Chat with friends on VK Messenger and with coworkers on VK WorkSpace.”
A recommended alternative is the messaging platform from VK, a Russia-based, popular social media platform in the country that functions similarly to Facebook. VK acquired ICQ in 2010 from AOL, which had acquired the service in 1998.
The first instant messenger
ICQ is considered one of the oldest instant messaging services on the Internet.
Named after the phrase “I Seek You,” the platform was developed by a small Israeli company called Mirabilis and launched in November 1996. ICQ has been around longer than other popular IM services such as AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), which has become synonymous with the instant messaging field.
Instant messaging services dominated the internet in the mid-1990s and early 2000s. Backed by the online tech giants of the time, services like AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger were some of the primary ways internet users interacted with each other before the advent of social media.
But despite these larger competitors, ICQ became popular among early Internet adopters, and in 1998 its biggest rival, AOL, bought the company for $287 million up front, then paid another $120 million over three years based on the service’s performance.
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2001, AOL Announced ICQ grew to over 100 million users. However, over the next few years, the increased availability and accessibility of social media apps like Facebook on mobile phones caused IM’s market share to decline significantly. Instant messenger usage declined as users migrated to platforms like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
The end of IM
Of the aforementioned IM platforms, MSN Messenger was the first to shut down in 2014, followed by AIM in 2017 and Yahoo Messenger in 2018. ICQ, however, survived.
AOL sold the service to VK in 2010 for $187.5 million, and continued to serve its loyal user base. VK said it had approximately 11 million ICQ users in 2022.
ICQ has long boasted a healthy user base outside the United States, which may explain why it has outlasted its contemporaries. The service identified users using ICQ numbers and conventional usernames, and was popular in countries such as China, where Hong Kong residents also Flocked WhatsApp migrated to ICQ in 2021 after users stopped using it due to changes in the platform’s privacy policy. Due to its ownership by VK, ICQ also had a large user base in Russia.
but, Signs VK plans to discontinue the platform, and ICQ’s mobile apps will disappear from Apple’s App Store and Google Play Store around 2022. ICQ remained accessible through a web-based platform and desktop apps, but those apps were last updated over a year ago.
Of course, 27 years is a long time. But with the demise of ICQ, it seems the era of instant messaging is officially over. That being said, X’s official ICQ account is fun These are their final days… or maybe they’re hinting at something new in the future.
The tweet may have been deleted
The @ICQ account published two posts containing GIFs from the film. Terminator 2 Friday, shortly after the closure was announced.
account Last Post• Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famous line, “I’ll be back.”
The tweet may have been deleted
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