ICQ

Thursday, February 28th, 2008

Backstory

(Please go directly to the next section if you aren’t interested in lengthy rants about the history of instant messaging.)

In November 1996 the Israeli company Mirabilis launched a then revolutionary, free-of-charge Internet messaging service called ICQ: You just needed to download and install a software application with the same name, then use it to set up an account on their servers, and finally add other users to your contact list. Whenever they were running the application and had an Internet connection, they were highlighted in the contact list so that you could send them short text messages with just one click. These messages were delivered instantly, and they could answer them just as quickly—much faster than e-mail which is rather designed for letter-like messages (with a salutation, several paragraphs of text, and a complimentary close). The new system had one big disadvantage right from the start: The application that you have to install is quite a load of crap, rather unstable and has become ever more bloated with all kinds of useless features since 1998 or so.

Anyway—soon after setting up my first Internet connection I installed ICQ on my computer and got an account with the number 3532458 (these numbers are assigned in a consecutive manner). Over the years a whole set of similar systems appeared on the “market”—best known are AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger—; each of these systems was conceived as an isolated application so that you could only communicate with people who were using the same service as you. Jabber (or rather XMPP), which finally joined the competition in 2000, was quite different: It was organized decentrally (a bit like e-mail), specified as an open standard (so that there was soon a whole bunch of applications to choose from), and some people even developed gateway transports so that you could convert your non-Jabber contacts to virtual Jabber contacts and thus communicate with all of them using just one application.

This solution had two disadvantages: First, none of the Jabber applications for Windows (which I was using then) was very good; second, the gateway services didn’t prove too reliable. So, some time later I moved on to Miranda IM, a client that works with Jabber as well as with the various proprietary services. About a year or two later I had got rid of this again and chose to use a IrssiBitlBee combination instead (both of these don’t really aim at occasional users, but they are great when you’re using more than one computer and don’t want your chat history to be scattered among them).

One nice day—on January 24th this year, to be exact—there was a new problem: BitlBee wasn’t able to connect to the ICQ server anymore, supposedly because my password was wrong. After some research I found that my account had probably just died, something that already has been happening randomly to accounts years ago. (Another possible explanation would be that someone might have hijacked my account after figuring out my—admittedly quite weak—password, but the password reset function that ICQ offers for these cases—and that normally works with any e-mail address which has previously been associated with that account—refused to send me my password either, so I don’t think that this is what happened.) A support inquiry didn’t yield any answer either of course.

Consequence

Although my latent aversion to ICQ has reached a completely new dimension now, I have finally decided to create a new account anyway because many of my contacts use only this service. I ask these people not to send anything anymore to my old number (3532458) and to use my new number 382040715 instead. Furthermore, I strongly suggest making the move to Jabber (which is the instant messaging system of the future anyway—even ICQ/AIM are experimenting with Jabber interfaces). Since the introduction of Google Talk, which is extremely easy to setup and use, there is really no valid excuse anymore for not using Jabber anyway.