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After nearly 28 years of operation, the ICQ messaging service will cease operations on June 26, according to its current owners.

You’d be forgiven for not realizing it still exists; the proto-IM service hasn’t been mainstream since the 2000s. But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it simultaneously laid the foundations for direct messaging and social networking as we know them in the post-Facebook era.

28 years of history

ICQ was something of an accident, however popular it became. Created by four Israeli computer geeks, it wasn’t even supposed to be the original idea.

After Netscape’s IPO, which heralded a new era of technology-based money-making ventures, the four were looking for an idea to work with. Their original plan was to launch a service that would make it easier to verify beeper messages. They invented ICQ as a tool for themselves while working on this project.

In the dial-up era, staying online all the time to receive messages or chat on platforms like IRC wasn’t for everyone. Most people had to keep those lines open for phone calls.

As a result, the creators of ICQ became frustrated that they could not see each other’s online messages. They developed ICQ as a better way to communicate from their homes while collaborating on the (now pointless) beeper project.

The app didn’t have a lot of marketing behind it, but it spread quickly by word of mouth – especially in the nascent online gaming communities around multiplayer dungeons (MUDs), early deathmatches, etc. More than anything else, the legacy bearer of ICQ today is Discord.

ICQ was eventually purchased by AOL and lost ground to more financially supported services such as AIM and MSN. Then came MySpace, Facebook, social media, iMessage, etc., leaving no room for the old ICQ.

In 2010, ICQ was acquired by a company then called Mail.ru, a major Russian provider of Internet applications. That company eventually transformed and changed its name to VK, and has since kept ICQ on life support as a sort of Russian alternative to Skype.

Message memories

In light of the news, several Ars staffers shared some of their memories of ICQ.

Samuel Axon – Senior Editor

ICQ had several unique features for the time. Those of us who used it may still remember our ICQ numbers; there were no usernames, but instead something closer to a phone number. The earlier someone joined, the shorter their number could be, so there was prestige in a shorter number. (Mine was 6377119 – the seven digits were respectable, but not the top.)

I signed up because I was playing the online game Meridian 59and its community largely uses ICQ for non-game communication.

ICQ offered online profiles and it was through these profiles that I met my first girlfriend in high school. I lived in Springfield, Missouri, and she lived in Joplin, which is a little bit closer. She was looking for people to date with similar interests, somehow came across my profile and saw that I was interested in writing and journalism. A classic ’90s summer teenage romance ensued.

It was the first thing I could think of in my life that resembled a Facebook-style social network, and it was also my first experience with anything resembling online dating. She found my profile, I sounded cool to her, and she messaged me.

I continued to use ICQ for years to communicate with my friends in the MUD and game development communities before other services took over in the 2000s. I probably lasted longer than most. Honestly, I miss that “oooh!” message sound. It was an odd choice, but it’s iconic to me.