I haven’t turned it on for years, though. That means I was the 65,361’st person to use it. Today Facebook and Twitter (and Pownce and Jaiku) have totally replaced IM for me. I think they were scared of taking stuff out which people liked, too, which made it hard to improve. At some point after 2001 it stopped seeing radical improvements. In 1996 it seemed like there was a new feature every few days. It got too cluttered and stopped being developed. Unlike Twitter IM has an expectation that you’ll answer it sometime soon.īut that’s my problem and I’m an outlier.

Why? Everytime I start it up I get a flurry of messages. It was sold to AOL eventually where it never got best of class status, always remaining spiritually behind AOL’s other IM client, AIM).įor me IM started sucking more and more until it got to the point that today I can’t use it. I’ll tell you why (I was a very early user of ICQ, which was the first instant messaging client that I remembered seeing.

Danny asks “ Why did we all stop using ICQ?”

Stop icq new version popup