Uh-oh! ICQ exists twenty years

Play ICQ’s shrill ‘uh-oh’ notification sound, and people will spontaneously look your way with a nostalgic look in their eyes. In the western world the chat app is a thing of the past, but in Russia ICQ, which is celebrating its twentieth anniversary, is still popular.

The first version of ICQ, or ‘I seek you’, appeared on November 15, 1996. The mother of all chat apps was created by Mirabilis, a company founded by four students from Israel. To send messages with the first version, users had to connect to the udp 4000 port at icq.mirabilis.com.

Users can be identified by unique numbers, which were distributed in sequence, starting at 10,000. In 1997 the first ICQ clients were released for Windows 3.1, 95, NT and Mac. According to Dimitry Oleynichenko, who tells about the history of the chat app in a blog on Medium, ICQ had more than 5 million users at the time and 1.3 million users were active daily.

In 1998, one million new ICQ users were added every three weeks. The success did not go unnoticed and AOL bought Mirabilis that same year for 287 million dollars, an unprecedented amount for a chat service at the time.

Around 2001 ICQ had its heyday, with more than 100 million registered users. With the rise of alternatives, such as MSN Messenger, many of those users disappeared and ICQ’s popularity declined in the western world. However, it remained the most popular instant messenger in Russian-speaking countries.

In the years that followed, the development of ICQ was put on the back burner. AOL had meanwhile put its own chat app on the market, which worked with the same protocol. ICQ was eventually sold by AOL to Mail.Ru in 2010 for $187.5 million. At that time, there were still 42 million active users, mainly in Russia.

ICQ still exists today, in versions for Windows, Mac, Linux, BlackBerry, Android and iOS. There is also a browser version. Today, the app has a WhatsApp-like interface and many features have been added such as video calling, photos and videos with Snapchat-like filters, a built-in photo editor, stickers and emojis.

Different ICQ versions. Images via blog post by Dimitry O. on Medium.