![]() Oh, and the desktop version is open source. It’s still available, and although it’s hard to say why you should choose it over the many other offerings today, it’s sort of comforting to think that the brand and basic function of something like ICQ can endure for so long in so chaotic an environment. You’d be better off reading this Medium post. I’m the wrong person to go into all the changes since then - the many forward-thinking features added, the sale in 2008 to what would later become the group, its enduring popularity in Russia and so on. In 2001, it had more than 100 million users. Mirabilis, the company formed around ICQ and its technologies, was bought shortly thereafter by AOL for $407 million ($287M down and $120M more contingent on performance) - an eye-popping number at the time, though we’ve gotten used to such things in the two decades since. (Disclosure: AOL owns TechCrunch - it was rather a different company back then, though.) Along with MSN Messenger, that pretty much blew the lid off the chat market, and prefigured today’s fractured ecosystem. Who can forget the little status icons, the sense of discovery and independence, the possibilities of a platform like this? It was popular among nerds of the day (source: was one), but this type of chat app quickly outgrew its humble beginnings.ĪOL Instant Messenger got its standalone in mid-1997, building on the concept and making it an easy transition from millions of AOL subscribers. And a relatively open architecture meant it could be cloned and forked. At first, contact lists and other info were even kept client-side, making it an early success of peer-to-peer as well as messaging. You could message anyone whose number you had, and you could gather them by fair means or foul, on IRC, BBS or AOL - or at school, of course, the way you’d exchange phone numbers. ICQ was simple and unencrypted, and every user was assigned a number - six digits at first, more later - for ease of operation. The online chat world was a simpler one at the time, at least in terms of the market and technology used. ![]() It was pretty barebones in its first form, released by its Israeli student creators in November 1996, but over the next year had versions available for Windows 95, 3.1 (not everyone wanted to upgrade) and Macs (presumably System 7). Download Teen Chat Room - AahaChat and enjoy it on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. has since converted the app to the mobile market, and now around half of its users are mobile rather than desktops.Uh-oh! It’s 20 years to the day since the introduction of one of the internet’s most well-remembered chat apps: ICQ. Read reviews, compare customer ratings, see screenshots, and learn more about Teen Chat Room - AahaChat. ICQ, like most instant messengers, has fallen out of favor among American users but remains popular in Russia and other parts of the world. Before you join a chat room, it is advised to read the rules and regulations since it is moderated by admins and moderators. In 2010, AOL sold Mirabilis to Digital Sky Technologies of Russia, which would later become the group. There are 19 different chatrooms on Chat Avenue which are: College, Adult (18+), Singles, Dating, General, Teen, Kids, Gay, Girls, Video, Sports, Music, Lesbian, Video Games, Boys, Mobile, Cam, and Live. Mirabilis continued to advance it and develop the software, but AOL didn't lift a finger to promote it. ![]() And with AOL's business going down the tubes in the early part of this decade, it basically neglected ICQ. It had an inherent conflict, since it had its own IM program. Trillian came about around then to provide a single interface to all IMs-it now supports Google Talk, Facebook, Twitter, ICQ and other communication apps-but it lacks a lot of the features of the specific messaging apps.įor a while, ICQ thrived and surpassed more than 100 million users. We had AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ and a few other also-rans. This was before the wave of insane megadeals.īy that point, we had a crowded IM market. In 1998, AOL, which had by then spun off AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) as a stand-alone app for non-AOL subscribers to use, bought Mirabilis for $287 million, plus another $120 million based on performance. Over time, ICQ added multi-user chat, SMS support and file transfers. Users were assigned a number rather than a user name like we have on Skype. Anyone could message you even if you were not on their friends list. It was a pretty basic app, and it lacked a lot of the security we now take for granted. It was all coming from a nifty little program I'd discovered called ICQ, which let me talk to friends in real time.Ĭreated by a group of Israeli college students who eventually formed the company Mirabilis to support development of the app, ICQ stood for "I seek you" and was intended as a way for Windows users to communicate much in the same way Unix users could send real-time messages. About 20 years ago, I started driving co-workers within listening distance crazy with constant chirps of "Uh oh!" emanating from my laptop.
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