Sources of ICQ desktop client by mail.ru

https://github.com/mailru/icq-desktop

by hexx86 • 10 years ago

101 72 10 years ago

github.com

dchest2• 10 years ago

With private key for Sparkle updates signing: https://github.com/mailru/icq-desktop/blob/master/mac/ICQ/ds...

Facepalm.

marvel_boy• 10 years ago

Newbie here. Could you elaborate?

txdv• 10 years ago

Sparkle is an open source update framework for osx.

I guess the private key is for signing the updates, so the user knows that the update is legit.

dedosk• 10 years ago

There is more

// TODO : change it after testing const static std::string flurry_key = "KYVQVW38PB2SP8CRJJ9R"; // test ICQ const static std::string flurry_url = "https://data.flurry.com/aah.do";

Source: https://github.com/mailru/icq-desktop/blob/master/core/stati...

huhtenberg• 10 years ago

A thing to keep in mind that ICQ used to be insanely huge in Russia and neighboring countries. Back in late 90s people would know their own ICQ ID by heart (which are numerical) and exchange them instead of phone numbers. You also could buy vanity 4-5 digit ICQ numbers for anywhere between few hundred dollars to few thousands. Don't know if things changed now, they probably have.

guard-of-terra• 10 years ago

They have, people moved to VK for messenging en masse when it hit, and whatsapp/viber is definitely used too.

No idea if many people are still on ICQ. Don't bother to find client to check.

marxidad• 10 years ago

It's just Russian bots now.

51Cards• 10 years ago

21747XX Still remember mine from the late 90's despite not having used ICQ in 12-ish years. Somehow it just stuck in your head.

SXX• 10 years ago

ICQ now probably as popular in Russia as XMPP. Most of normal users moved over to Skype, social networks and newer message apps long ago.

baddestpoet• 10 years ago

Wow, this led me to discover that I also still know my ID. Before Facebook's rise in Europe around '04-'05 or so ICQ was the online communication channel of choice pretty much everywhere around here, not only in the Eastern part of the continent.

zeeZ• 10 years ago

Took me a while, but I managed to remember it. Along with the (unique) password. It shows 143 contacts, of which 1 is actually online. From skimming through the names I have no idea who more than half of those people are, the rest are family and local friends who I still have contact with.

Contact spreadsheets for teens in Germany back then contained name, address, phone number, email address and ICQ number. We didn't even have a MySpace back then ;)

hias• 10 years ago

ICQ also was very popular in Europe. I still remember my ICQ uin, even after not using it anymore since the rise of facebook and whatsapp.

elsurudo• 10 years ago

Was popular with my circle of friends in Canada as well back in the day. Still remember my number! They also had a cool feature where you could create a "group", and you could broadcast messages to that group, etc.

sakopov• 10 years ago

ICQ was insanely popular in the US as well. I remember getting on it and chatting with my friends when i was a teenager in the late 90s.

captainmuon2• 10 years ago

Is this a leak or a release?

Anyway, it seems like 5-10 years too late. I remember when I was in school (till 2003) that ICQ was huge. People knew their ICQ numbers by heart, and it was as important as e.g. WhatsApp or Facebook is today. It even anticipated microblogging - you could set a custom "status message", and people would check each others messages to see what others were doing. They had a lot of features that were not to different from what Facebook has today - you had Flash based minigames, a personal homepage-like area etc.. And of course they had a huge network advantage. I really wonder how they dropped the ball...

oblio• 10 years ago

Probably the same way Yahoo did it, who also had those features and now is close to the dumpster.

Lack of focus, I guess?

giarc• 10 years ago

I can still remember the "uh-oh" sound. I remember searching for and download sound boards to replace the sounds. They also had that chat window where you could actually the user typing. Nostalgia eh.

jasonkostempski• 10 years ago

I fell asleep with ICQ running and my speakers turned way up once. 3 AM and someone decided to send me a message. That was like 15 years ago, I still freeze up a little when I hear it.

frandroid• 10 years ago

The cash register at my favourite health food store uses the "uh-oh" sound. To this day it remains one of the most annoying sounds I've ever heard, and it will not leave my life.

dejv• 10 years ago

I used to work in one game company and one of my team mate had parrot that he was bringing to our offices. This parrot like to annoy certain people with uh-oh sound, which always cause automatic reaction of checking the the ICQ client and angry swears to the parrot.

karlshea• 10 years ago

I'm not 100% certain about this, but I always felt like they stole that sound from the game Worms.

floatboth• 10 years ago

Nowadays I hear that exact sound… at McDonald's. In Russia, they use this sound at their kitchens to signal that something's ready. Or something. You can hear it when you're ordering.

qubex• 10 years ago

I have it set as the notification sound for a friend with whom I exchange text messages very frequently. After we graduated from high school in 1999 we communicated with ICQ almost exclusively for the first couple of years until we switched to MSN Messenger, so it constitutes a form of vestigial nostalgia.

I'm surprised to read of people hating it so much.

eterm• 10 years ago

Desktop software always had a friction that the web didn't.

Desktop software was fine, until you were in an internet cafe, at a friend's house, or most importantly, at work, where computers were locked down.

You couldn't use msn messenger at work, you could use facebook because it was just a web page.

glastra• 10 years ago

There were plenty of web-based MSN Messenger clients.

captainmuon2• 10 years ago

Although to be fair, there was ICQ2GO (go.icq.com), and a bit later meebo. Both worked fine on the road, at internet cafes, or at school.

clw8• 10 years ago

I seem to recall ICQ's popularity already being in free-fall by 2000. My guess would be that as former AOL users switched to local ISPs, they would download the familiar AIM instead of ICQ. Most of my ICQ friends were internet friends; everyone at school used AIM.

EDIT: according to Wikipedia, ICQ peaked in 2001.

angus_prune2• 10 years ago

At some point ICQ made some really bad development decisions and people avoided the new versions like the plague.

I can't remember which version in particular was in demand, but I do remember lots of sites specifically serving up the installers of the old versions.

rmsaksida2• 10 years ago

I really wonder how they dropped the ball.

In my country, ICQ died when Microsoft started shipping MSN Messenger with Windows and worked hard to make people aware of it. (Microsoft even did a silly marketing campaign for MSN that involved a guy dressed as a butterfly). People used the Messenger that was already installed in their OS, and ICQ was history.

I believe the same thing happened in most other countries, because it only took a couple of years for all the foreign ICQ buddies I had to move off to MSN.

drzaiusapelord• 10 years ago

I seem to have a different experience. Everyone migrated to Yahoo or AIM with MSN a distant third. In my social circle, yahoo was the king of chat for a very long time.

konart• 10 years ago

Well, ICQ was very popular up to 2005-2010. MSN was never a popular choice (in fact it was not popular at all).

So people usually used ICQ, Skype and Jabber. Gmail+GTalk done the job killing ICQ for most here.

jandrese2• 10 years ago

From what I remember ICQ was always fairly nerdy and once everyone's non-nerd friends started showing up on AIM they had to make the switch.

One thing I miss from ICQ was the ability to have messages stored on the server and delivered next time your friend logged in. None of the popular messaging apps today do that.

I also remember that ICQ made a huge mess of their webpage back in the dawn of the dotcom era.

robzyb• 10 years ago

One thing I miss from ICQ was the ability to have messages stored on the server and delivered next time your friend logged in. None of the popular messaging apps today do that.

Eh? Firstly, people are never offline these days. Secondly, Facebook Messenger (and SMS and Email).

laumars3• 10 years ago

One thing I miss from ICQ was the ability to have messages stored on the server and delivered next time your friend logged in. None of the popular messaging apps today do that.

You mean aside Skype, Facebook messenger, Slack and Whatsapp? And those are just the 4 services I currently (and reluctantly) use. So there's going to be others I've not mentioned.

mseebach• 10 years ago

I really wonder how they dropped the ball...

Failing to give people usernames.

People knew their ICQ numbers by heart

Some did, but the fact that you emphasise that as something remarkable is a hint here. I specifically remember the numbers as being a significant source of friction when connecting to new people. For contrast, I still easily remember what my username on MSN Messenger was when I started using that in around 2000 -- because it was my email address.

DdCb7Qlk2lyaw• 10 years ago

> I really wonder how they dropped the ball...
Failing to give people usernames.

If this is really the case then we can expect skype to die soon. I remember some time ago you were able to add contacts using skype logins, recently I was trying to do that on my friends Windows machine and failed. I simply wasn't able to add myself to his friendlist. I found somewhere on MS forum information that if you need that kind of functionality you should instead provide more information about you so you'd be easier to find...

andreygrehov• 10 years ago

Looks like a leak, because the source code is no longer available.

stevewillows• 10 years ago

I had their support reset my password to a different email account by listing three generic names that I thought might be in my contacts list. It was great for me, but not a secure or reliable process.

sergioocon• 10 years ago

I don't even remember what people I had in my contact lists.... I haven't talked in years to some I do remember

Time to open a new account?

nyddle• 10 years ago

I've just installed an official ICQ client on my phone and it seems to be in sync with the latest messaging trends, but I'm the only person online...

jjfine• 10 years ago

Taken down.

michaeldwan• 10 years ago

They just took the repo down.

pmlnr• 10 years ago

Fork: https://github.com/fungosforks/icq-desktop

0x0• 10 years ago

That's a dodgy looking commit, wonder what else is lurking. https://github.com/fungosforks/icq-desktop/commit/eced2373c6...

mikey_p• 10 years ago

Say what you will about ICQ, but I can still log in with my number and password from the late 90s and see the names of the people I chatted with in high school in my contacts list. This is nothing short of somewhat amazing in the world of software startups and shutterings, etc.

FWIW, I've also realized that my Yahoo account from circa 1996 works just as well. my.yahoo.com even remembers what news topics, stocks, weather locations, etc I setup nearly 20 years ago.

romaniv• 10 years ago

This.

I miss ICQ. Well, I still use it occasionally, since it's part of my MirandaIM setup. But I miss it whenever I use Skype for IMs. For starters, I can aggregate ICQ, Jabber and a bunch of other services inside one lightweight open-source client. Also, it had an entirely different social vibe, which is missing from Skype. It was okay to chat with near-strangers in ICQ. It was okay to add people from some random forum to your contact list. It was okay to say "hi" to people when they went online (as opposed to always-online on 10 different devices Skype mentality).

donatj• 10 years ago

YES. I haven't chatted with a stranger in AGES, but a handful of my closest friends online to this day I met by IMing random people on ICQ / AIM.

meritt• 10 years ago

The good ole days of ICQ. I felt honored to hold a low six-digit user id which I still remember. On the other hand, I still haven't memorized my wife's phone number.

xenihn• 10 years ago

I wish I could remember any of the info that I used with ICQ. I can't even remember the e-mail that I used back then. It's been so long.

acquacow• 10 years ago

Well, that's because it lives on AOL servers now and was merged with Oscar/etc...

iolothebard• 10 years ago

I was going to say you're late to ICQ if you found it in the late 90s, but then I realized I'm still using my yahoo mail account and have no room talk ;-)

When I first used ICQ in 1996 (a buddy introduced it to me) I couldn't figure out who'd be in front of their computer that often. Plus the 90s was still largely on dial-up as well.

unicornporn• 10 years ago

I still log in too. If I recall things right the chat logs were stored on the server back in the days. Are they still there? Could they be recovered? That would be awesome...

EDIT: I guess I was wrong... https://www.icq.com/support/icq_7/messages/is_my_message_his...

x3ro• 10 years ago

It has been taken down. Does anyone have a cloned copy and can make it available?

throwaway_xx9• 10 years ago

I had a meeting with the ICQ founders and senior engineers in 2000.

At the time, they were using 9 T1's, which even then seemed pretty small as far as bandwidth goes.

lcfcjs• 10 years ago

Subseven always worked well with ICQ :D

Joyfield• 10 years ago

Still remember my number, 817598.

hippich• 10 years ago

and it is gone

Sources of ICQ desktop client by mail.ru

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