Microsoft's trailblazing Windows 95 was barely a year old, Nintendo had just introduced the N64, and those with a reason to have a cell phone actually used it to talk on. has since converted the app to the mobile market, and now around half of its users are mobile rather than desktops.ICQ, short for the phrase "I Seek You," laid the groundwork for standalone instant messaging clients when it arrived in November 1996. ICQ, like most instant messengers, has fallen out of favor among American users but remains popular in Russia and other parts of the world. In 2010, AOL sold Mirabilis to Digital Sky Technologies of Russia, which would later become the group. 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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