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402852360. This number seems to have been knocked out somewhere on the brain's cortex and, even after a decade of forgetfulness, it is remembered that he was moving several times faster than his own date of birth. This number is a donkey in memory as the first line of the poem, which we learn during our school years. This number – UIN – user identifier that was used (and is still used) to connect to the ICQ. Our story is about the rise, rise and fall of the first ICQ mbad instant messenger.
A week ago, ICQ Messenger stopped supporting older versions of the official app, as well as unofficial customers. The Mail.Ru group, which now owns the messenger, is motivated by the fact that the old protocol no longer supports many "new features": calls, audio messages, stickers and group discussions.
Until May 2019, the UIN number will still be supported, but with the entry into force of Russian rules relating to the identification of users on the ICQ phone number, it there will in fact be no connection between it and the past. Trump's six-letter signs and signs will be replaced by phone numbers, and the anonymous coffin will be completely stabbed.
How it all began
In 1996, the innovative Windows 95 was a year old. Sergey Brin and Larry Page were striving to create the world's largest search engine. The young Game Boy players were hacked into Pokémon Red and Blue, while the Deep Blue chess supercomputer was defeated by Garry Kasparov and John Carmack. and in many countries on the planet Internet and mobile phones still did not exist.
In November 1996, after two months of development, the Israeli company Mirabilis released the first instant messaging program, ICQ. This is not an abbreviation, but an acronym – the slogan of the messenger I'm looking for ("I'm looking for you"). In the summer of 1996, Mirabilis was founded by four Israelis: Yair Goldfinger, Arik Vardi, Safi Viziger and Amnon Amir. They all met while they were working in the same technology company and united around a revolutionary idea at that time. They were all about 20 years old. The fourth founder of the company left for the second month to go to the university. He funded the development of Yossi Vardi, the father of one of the founders, who invested a few hundred thousand dollars in the project.
"If Mirabilis was a band, Sefi Viziger would be their lead singer and songwriter, – American Forbes wrote about the founding team of ICQ in 1999. – Goldfinger improves the database, Vardi writes code and Wiziger is engaged in the sophisticated design of the ICQ interface. " It's Wiziger who invented the ICQ icon and its metamorphosis according to the status of the user: whether he is busy or not online.
"The icons that he invented, or something similar, will become the generally accepted visual vocabulary in the next 10 years. Think of them as cyberspace road signs. Wiziger – the genius who invented them ", Jerry Michalsky, who was at the time president of a major technology consulting firm in San Francisco, spoke about the co-founder of ICQ 20 years ago.
A Mirabilis triple was installed in a three-room apartment in the city of San Jose, California, where Internet access was cheaper. "We were in the underwater phase, – Goldfinger said in 2003 in an interview with israel21c. – We have not watched television or movies for six months, we do not go to restaurants, we work all the time, develop and maintain the service, improve the product. "
ICQ had the advantage that the program was distributed free of charge. At first, about 40 friends of the founders used the messenger, but in May 1997, 850,000 users were already chatting online. By April of next year, this figure reached 9 million, of which 2.5 million used the program each day. And every day, thousands more people downloaded the program. At the same time, without any marketing: word of mouth worked.
How to make a loss on hundreds of millions
In June 1998, the American company AOL proposed to buy ICQ for 407 million dollars, but the messenger does not think long: the messenger did not generate any profit whereas 12 million people already used it. It should be noted that 20 years later, in the new fully computerized world of mobile technology, numbers have fallen further to this value.
ICQ of the late nineties was the personification of this era of the Internet. Twenty-year-olds created a product that did not generate revenue, had no business plan, or even an idea of how to monetize everything. But in two years, the founders of ICQ turned into multimillionaires, which provoked the "Mirabilis effect" among young IT specialists in Israel.
Granted, the transfer of tens of millions of dollars on their account did not have a major effect on their way of life. As Goldfinger said five years after the transaction, he had the same car, he lived in the same apartment, wore the same jeans and the same tee-shirt. Have they become a little more: "I've never done anything crazy with this money. None of us did. "
AOL did not just buy the product, but acquired the entire company. The new multimillionaires under the contract had to work on the product for two more years, but already as part of a company. After this period, they scattered on their own projects, which, however, could not acquire the same global popularity as ICQ.
Goldfinger, for example, has decided to fund various Israeli niche startups:
"It does not matter if they are bigger or smaller than Mirabilis. I do what I like. Some people like to drive fashionable cars, travel the world or write books. I like to create software and programs.
I watch programmers as artists. They do not draw, but create something new from nothing. I consider my work of art. Most artists do not do it for money. They do not care so much that they can create. It's the same with me: I like that, I like that. I am lucky because I win my hobby.
Money gives you the opportunity to choose what you want to do, without looking at how you will work before the end of the month. "
The founders eventually gave up their offspring, but this had no effect on the growth dynamics of ICQ. In the spring of 2001, the messenger had more than 100 million registered users. It has become the most popular medium of communication on the network. Do you estimate whether, according to various expert estimates in 2001, only 550 million people had access to the Internet. Already in 2005, the same number of accounts were registered in ICQ.
Uroboros Fall
The third-party clients for the messaging protocol that ICQ was working on began to appear quite early. Already in 2000, Roland Rabien presented a minimalist clone of ICQ, called Miranda ICQ and weighing only 100 kb. No message history or plugin support is only an ascetic mail client.
The main developers of Miranda changed constantly. Sometimes they simply disappeared mysteriously from the Internet and other kind people took their banner. The customer has acquired plug-ins, supporting other messaging protocols, but has kept the essentials: the lack of integrated advertising, thanks to which AOL comes first among ICQ users. Nobody has ever thought that stickers or emoticons can be sold in lots for money.
QIP 2005 was born in 2005 (Quiet Internet Pager – a silent Internet pager). It was probably the most popular third-party client for the OSCAR protocol (on which ICQ worked) in the CIS countries. Unlike Miranda, who, as a naked young woman, should have been "sprinkled" with plug-ins, QIP came up with a pretty basic feature.
In this program, there was a built-in spam filter: the user could write a question and answer that the contact who was not in the address book had to enter to contact him. . The user can set more than a dozen statuses – from 'Invisible to all' to 'Eat' or 'Depression'.
With stealth modes, you can play fairly flexibly by customizing your contact list that may receive valuable information about your online presence.
Frankly, the emoticon cones in QIP were much colder than the badogs of the official ICQ client. And in principle, the number of parameters in the program was larger than the official version of the messenger.
Yes, and a feature as useful as pulling out of another user 's contact list now seems to be something extraordinary!
Over time, the QIP developer has added new features, reworked the client, released the QIP PDA for Symbian phones, QIP Infium, QIP 2012, the client added support for Jabber, Mail.Ru Agent, IRC and some social network protocols.
Largely because of the number of tweaks, whistles and false QIP 2005 and have gained such popularity, eclipsing ICQ. And it was not always in advertising, the Russian equivalent was much more practical.
And they have obviously annoyed the tycoons at the head of ICQ: they contain a database, support the protocol, provide servers to ensure the operability of ICQ and can not pay much to their users. This is why at the end of zero, AOL has become more and more frequent changes in the OSCAR protocol. As a result, alternative messengers could fall off the network for a day, sometimes even longer. ICQ, in fact, has fought against its own users.
For example, in July 2008, changes to ICQ servers resulted in the closure of many unofficial customers. The contacts who used these clients have received an official notification from ICQ Systems. This situation repeated several times in 2008 and 2009.
In the context of the fight against the windmills, the popularity of ICQ declined, mainly because of the strong competition of social networks. Facebook and VKontakte both made popular communication very popular. As strange as it may seem, we will now explain. ICQ has always been an anonymous messenger. Yes, there was some sort of questionnaire that could even be accessed by users around the world, but it was rare for anyone to enter their true data. Everyone was hiding behind his nickname and half of his contact list could not even be named, apart from a few zhezhechka friends from anonymous forums. The ICQ account was not attached to the mail (initially) and the long UIN number served as the unique identifier.
Facebook, then VKontakte took the conversation from the shadows to the light of day – we started matching and flirting under real names and first names.
In April 2010, ICQ was sold to Mail.Ru Group. At that time, Russia and the CIS countries were almost the only region where the decline in audience was not as pronounced. However, for example, between December 2009 and December 2010 alone, the monthly ICQ audience decreased by 17.6 million and was established at 33.5 million people. Catastrophic figures.
In addition, ICQ has managed to miss the boom of mobile platforms. Yes, Java clients for mobile phones have been around for a long time, but that does not mean that they were ubiquitous. ICQ was perceived as a desktop story and most mobile phone customers were exactly what was not always practical as tracing paper of the desktop version of the clients. Yes, and the growing popularity of Skype, which offers free calls, could not be ignored. On the desktop, it has severely damaged ICQ blood, especially in the business user segment.
Today, ICQ is another story. The story of a product that tries to recover from heaven on earth, trying to rejuvenate, invaded by masks, group calls and stickers, which receives raw updates, colas and outings on Google Play. Nevertheless, it is nice that the first messenger remains in service 20 years later, so be it for many people who have died.
And what messenger do you use today as the main one?
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