![]() ![]() “In ’97, there were already 7 competing products, and 2 years later there were 1,000 competing products.”Įven if timing was crucial, the founders also had to nail the product. “If came to me a year earlier, not in ’96 but ’95, there would have been too few people who were using the internet,” he said in a 2018 interview. The timing of ICQ’s launch was critical to its early success, according to founding investor Yossi Vardi. ![]() AIM offered something similar, but it didn’t debut until a year later. The concept of centralizing real time conversations in a single messaging app was totally new in 1996. Centralized conversationsĪ searchable user directory was just one of ICQ’s unique features. Best of all, this info was searchable: a big differentiator for ICQ in its early days. The UIN was the only part of your ICQ profile that was public by default, but you could choose to share the email address registered to your account to facilitate people getting in touch with you. Registered users were assigned a User Identification Number, instead of an alphanumeric username, upon signing up. “ICQ” is meant to represent the words “I seek you.” It’s a phrase that sums up one of the things that made ICQ unique out of the gate: anyone could message you even if you hadn’t connected previously.Īctually finding your friends on the ICQ client was the challenging part. ICQ was launched on the Windows operating system in 1996, the project of four college students (and one of their dads) from Israel. How did ICQ get started, what made it unique, and what happened to ICQ? Let’s take a look. ICQ deserves recognition, though, for pioneering some of the best features of IM. That honor goes to ICQ, an instant messenger that AIM, for a number of reasons, overshadowed. Everyone you knew had an AIM account (which meant you had to have one too).īut AIM, for all of its commercial success, actually wasn’t the first messenger or IM program to hit it big. ![]() Growing up in the Nineties and early 2000s, AOL Instant Messenger was the IM app that seemed to make instant messaging mainstream. ![]()
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