NEMCD / Life January 21, 2017 4 min read

Goodbye, ICQ: Letting Go of the Old in 2017

Antonio NEMCD Author

Published Jan 21, 2017 · Updated Nov 12, 2026 · 4 min

It’s already 2017, and recently something dawned on me: to make room for something new, you have to get rid of old things you no longer need. And you have to keep doing it.

ICQ and Telegram: out with the old, in with the new

I’m a fairly conservative person and keep using old things: clothes, programs, an old laptop. Why? Because I already have them, while new ones have to be found, chosen and bought with money that is rarely spare. So everything moves slowly, by inertia.

Maybe that’s partly right: it’s stable and familiar. But progress, if any, is very slow that way. Time goes on, you start falling behind, and the gap keeps growing.

So I decided to start by getting rid of old and unnecessary things, above all those that cost nothing to drop and free up time and resources.

ICQ goes first

I’ve already drawn up a plan and I’m starting to carry it out. The first thing to go is ICQ.

ICQ hasn’t been relevant for several years. Plenty of apps and services have taken over chatting and sharing photos and videos. Here’s what I use:

Skype for voice calls, conference calls and video calls;
Viber for chatting with friends and sharing photos and jokes;
Telegram for topic channels and group chats;
WhatsApp a little, for talking to certain people;
Facebook, VK, YouTube and, very rarely, Odnoklassniki.

ICQ isn’t on the list: I stopped using it long ago because almost nobody is left there. Other apps are more convenient, they live on people’s phones and are always at hand.

Why I kept it so long

So why did I keep ICQ running all this time? Pure inertia: it was already there, and keeping it cost me nothing. I used it through QIP, an alternative client that was more convenient than the official one.

31 of 387 online

The screenshot shows what my contact list had turned into: hundreds of people in groups (colleagues, former employees, clients, friends), with only about one in twelve online.

I remember buying a short six-digit ICQ number (UIN) many years ago for about $10. Later I bought a couple more for online stores and a couple in reserve, in case I needed them and the price went up, since short numbers would become even rarer. But years went by, and hardly anyone needs ICQ now.

Can you imagine paying $10 for a Viber account today? Hardly. Why would you, if a Viber account is tied to your phone number? There’s nothing to remember: people don’t even need to know your number or carrier. You simply show up in their Viber, as long as you’re in their phone book.

A bit of ICQ history

ICQ (“I seek you”) was released by the Israeli company Mirabilis in November 1996. AOL bought it in 1998, and in April 2010 AOL sold ICQ to Digital Sky Technologies for $187.5 million; that autumn the company was renamed Mail.Ru Group. For many of us, ICQ was the first messenger: people printed their ICQ numbers on business cards and websites, the way they list phone numbers now.

It’s a pity messengers can’t talk to each other the way mobile carriers do: you can call a number on any network from any other. Then everyone could use whichever messenger they like. Mail.ru, for example, connected ICQ with its own Mail.ru Agent, so their users can see each other. But most developers stick to their own protocols and features. It’s like phone chargers: every manufacturer used to have its own connector, micro-USB made life much easier, and Apple still does its own thing.