Social Networking

Remembering ICQ: A Page Out of History

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Early ICQ logo, with a green flower and a red petal.

I got onto ICQ very early in its life, around 1996 or 1997, with a 6-digit UIN (298387 — sadly stolen years later). I loved it, it’s how I stayed connected with family and friends, how I met new people, how I connected on the Internet at a time when the Internet was trying to figure out what communication and community looked like.

Years later I became a developer in the IM space working on Gaim/Pidgin, which supported ICQ and a myriad of other services. Looking back, seeing the evolution from ICQ to services like AIM and MSN to modern chats like Discord and Slack, there really hasn’t been a system truly like it since.

The pager model was quite different from what IMs evolved into. There was less a focus on “chat with me right now!” and more of a “I’ve sent you a message, get back to me with a reply when you can.”

The reliance on modems and limited internet time was clearly a factor in that design.

And really, it wasn’t so much that IM systems that came after that were an entirely different paradigm. It really just came down to the UI choices. With nearly all IM clients, when a person messaged you, a window popped up. With ICQ, you got a little “uh oh!” sound and a blinking icon in your ICQ window, and could choose to deal with it at your leisure.

That difference may seem small, but significantly changed the expectations around conversations. When an IM is in your face, you have to make a choice right then: Respond, or dismiss. Either way, it stole your attention away from what you were doing, and like a salesman handing you a product they want you to purchase, you feel a sense of obligation to engage.

The ICQ model was different: There’s a message waiting for you, and when you’re ready and available, you can choose to deal with it. You didn’t even see the contents of the message until you were ready, so there’s no guilt-driven drive to respond when a message came in. No “Well I guess I can answer this question real quick…” Don’t want to see anything at all? Just close or minimize the window, come back later.

If you wanted an actual live chat with rapid responses, you could do that, but it wasn’t the default. It wasn’t the expectation.

Today, you may be used to setting “Away”, “Not Available”, and “Do Not Disturb” statuses, and even going “Invisible”, but how about “Free for Chat”?

These days we deal with demands on our time all throughout the day. Notifications on our phones designed to draw our attention. News alerts that reach for emotional reactions. Incoming text and chat messages on a dozen services, all with snippets of a text that make you want to read the rest and then maybe respond before you forget.

There really isn’t incentive for services to adopt the ICQ model so much these days, as everyone’s competing for your attention, but the passive nature of messages and notifications that was part of the original ICQ could be a lesson in how to build software that helps keep people connected, while also letting us claw back control of our own time.

Early ICQ was unique. It’s changed over time, adopting to modern trends, newer protocols, and even new owners. The ICQ of today isn’t the same ICQ of 1996, that’s for sure (but surprisingly, your 1996 UIN would still work today). Still, it’s sad to see it go after almost 28 years, even though it’s not the same service it once was.

It’s been heartening seeing how many people remember it fondly. I know for me it helped set my life on a course of events that led to my involvement in a major open source project, then to my first job in the tech industry, and then to my first real company.

The service may be gone, but it won’t be forgotten. Not only are there lessons to learn from the way ICQ tackled communication and agency online, but there are, it turns out, enthusiasts working to bring it back:

  • The NINA and Escargot project (Twitter) is building their own ICQ server, fully compatible with ICQ clients, and the Discord has been flooded with people looking to discover ICQ for the first time or rediscover it all over again.
  • Pidgin still supports ICQ through third-party plugins.

And though I haven’t found one yet, I do hope that someone will recreate the original ICQ experience in some form. Or better, take what ICQ did well and think how we might learn from it when designing the interactions of today. I for one wouldn’t mind a simple, casual, and non-invasive approach to communication again.

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Random friend seeking on Google Talk?

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Has anybody else noticed this?

Over the past several months, I’ve had a few people add me to their Google Talk account, claiming they want to make friends. The conversations start simple enough, asking basic “getting to know you” questions. Nothing seems too prying, and it certainly doesn’t seem like a bot. However, in each case, something doesn’t fully seem to add up, or maybe I’m just being paranoid. Either the person doesn’t remember how they found my address, or they claim they were just trying random addresses. Some people are from India, some from the US. However, they never seem to be able to find a picture when requested. They look and look but never manage to find one, and then suddenly have to go.

I’ve IM’d with a couple of them for a few days, a week, just to see if they were going to ask any questions indicating they were looking for specific information, but they haven’t really.

I’d feel bad if these were actually real people just “looking for a friend,” as they’ve said, but the fact that nobody can seem to give me a good reason for how they got my info concerns me, as does the behavior about a picture. Have other people seen this? Is it some new kind of weird spam/info gathering attempt? Or what?

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5 ways to make Twitter work for you

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I’m a big fan of Twitter, the social presence site that’s been getting a lot of buzz lately. It’s an idea that was almost too easy. Provide a way for people to say what they’re doing right now. Allow other people to see it, in a semi-controlled manner. It’s kind of like away/available messages on MSN, AIM, Google Talk, etc., but separated from the actual IM accounts and put in a central place.

Now, Twitter as a lazy form of blogging seems silly to many people who just don’t want to share what they’re doing every minute with the world. Fortunately, Twitter’s power is in its simplicity, and it can be useful in other ways. Here’s five ways you can make Twitter work for you.

  1. Status reports

    Like many people, I’m supposed to submit a weekly status report to my manager describing what I’ve done in the week. I typically start writing it up on the day it’s due, trying hard to remember everything I’ve done. Sometimes I’m good and actually write these down as I go along, but then I spend too much time organizing it on paper, when I should be doing that when I prepare the actual status report.

    Alternatively, I could use Twitter to record things as I do them, and then look over my archive or at an RSS feed of my activity when I begin to prepare the status report. Entering data into Twitter is quick and easy, and it gives you enough room for a short description while at the same time limiting what you need to say. So in the end, you have a nice summary of your week.

    Depending on how public you want it, you could even inform other co-workers of your Twitter account, making it easier for people to know who’s working on what. Not long ago I posted a Twitter update about something I was doing and a co-worker immediately came in and asked about it. Pretty useful.

  2. Keep organized at conferences or events

    When at conferences or some sort of large gathering, it’s easy for people to get out of sync with each other. Dinner appointments may be missed, people may end up in different talks, or whatever. The solution I’ve been personally using in the past is to try to catch everybody on IRC or IM, or just call/text message the people involved. However, this can be a pain and can involve a lot of micro-management.

    Instead, get people to create Twitter accounts and add each other as friends. Set up SMS notification and communicate through Twitter posts. You can send a quick “This conference is ending in 10 minutes, so let’s meet at McDonalds for lunch at 2:30” post to inform everybody of the current plans. You don’t even need access to a computer, as you can send updates via SMS as well. For most phone services, sending this one SMS is going to be cheaper and easier than sending SMS messages to multiple people, so there’s a net win here.

    You can apply this to parties or to school as well.

  3. “Note to self…”

    How often have you thought of something you need to do or something to remember for later, or even a neat piece of info that you know you’re going to forget? I’d say a lot of us aren’t organized enough to have a central place for these notes. I typically use post-its, but those become disorganized quickly, and by the time I think about it later, I’ve lost the note.

    Give Twitter a try for anything of the “Note to self” variety. You can refer back to these notes later in your RSS reader or your Twitter archive page.

  4. News updates and release announcements

    Many projects maintain a news update or release announcements listserv or RSS feed, but Twitter is a pretty good alternative as well. Many people check their Twitter page throughout the day or are in some way notified (via a program or SMS message) when someone posts to Twitter. Take advantage of this by creating an account for your project and posting whenever there’s a new release. It might get to your users faster.

    A couple examples of projects making use of Twitter in this regard include WordPress and 30Boxes.

  5. Record your travels

    I often take a lot of pictures when travelling, but forget exactly what I did on what day. Makes it harder to write about it later or associate meanings to the pictures when I finally go to upload them.

    Given Twitter’s ability to post via SMS, it’s easy to make brief notes about your trip as you go. Others can see how your trip is progressing, and you can use those notes later to document your trip better.

For those who know me and use Twitter, feel free to look me up or add me. I’ll be posting a few other tricks I’m experimenting with in a future post, such as how to tag your Twitter posts and separate them into multiple RSS feeds.

Other interesting Twitter reads:

  • Twitter Lingo – Controlling Twitter through SMS
  • Twitterholic – List of the top 100 users of Twitter in order of number of followers
  • RSS2Twitter – Auto-converts RSS feeds to Twitter posts
  • Twitter Tools – Several tools, clients, mashups, and plugins for working with Twitter

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