With ICQ shutting down on 26 June 2024, I cannot help feeling nostalgic. Do you remember your old ICQ number /UIN/? I remember mine: 89599910. What about you?
ICQ was the first messaging software I genuinely loved. I still remember the distinctive notification sound. At a time when most users were on dial-up connections, ICQ’s presence feature was a game changer.
Created by Mirabilis in 1996, ICQ was the pioneer, soon followed by competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft. For me personally, as an administrator and operator of an XMPP server, this moment highlights the value of open standards. Jabber, which evolved into XMPP1, was born to centralise all messengers through gateways. Unlike proprietary systems, XMPP offers a decentralised and flexible framework that gives users more control and encourages innovation.
This is the end of an era. ICQ lasted 27 years. IRC (Internet Relay Chat), an open protocol, outlived it. So here’s hoping XMPP continues to develop just as successfully, and that by 2026 we can say it has a longer history than ICQ.
The future belongs to open platforms and federation!
More information about the communication protocol can be found in the article XMPP - Communicate Freely!, as well as in the official documentation of Chatrix.One - a Bulgarian XMPP server. ↩︎