China Fund News Taylor
Good weekend, everyone. Here's a piece of news. The elder brother of Tencent QQ, ICQ, announced its closure.
ICQ, an Internet living fossil, announced to stop service
Taylor did not expect that a chat software called "ICQ", which he came across in Internet cafes during his junior high school years, had not announced its closure until today.
ICQ, the Internet Living Fossil, announced on its official website that it will stop service on June 26, 2024, and the ancestor of chat software will come to an end after nearly 28 years of online operation.
ICQ is the concatenated abbreviation of I Seek You. It first appeared in November 1996. ICQ was launched by the Israeli company Mirabilis after less than two months of development. It predates and influenced many popular chat programs at that time, including AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger.
Incredibly, ICQ also survived longer than its main competitors: AIM was closed at the end of 2017, Yahoo's communication program was in trouble in the middle of 2018, and Microsoft abandoned its Messenger client in 2014.
At that time, ICQ provided a number of innovative functions, including multi-user chat, asynchronous offline messaging, recoverable file transfer and searchable directories.
ICQ was acquired by AOL in 1998 and then by Mail in 2010 Ru Group (a Russian social networking website). Instant messaging chat was not new at that time, but ICQ's convenience in using UX (which can also deliver documents in real time), coupled with the one-on-one dialogue operation, made it popular quickly. It was reported that ICQ had registered more than 100 million accounts at the beginning of 2000. After the acquisition of VK, ICQ became very popular in Russia, and later developed a mobile version to usher in modernization. However, with the rise of other chat software (such as MSN, Skype, etc.) and the popularity of social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, many users in the United States and around the world have stopped using ICQ, and ICQ has gradually declined. Although ICQ has stopped its service, the official said that users who are still using it can use VK Messenger to contact friends.
Netizen comment: This time, I'm really married
In this regard, many netizens said that this time it really felt that youth was over.
Cute little Luoli Wenwen: opened OICQ, and the chat record stopped in late autumn last year~I still remember this.
__Ray: It's a living fossil, probably the earliest impression of the Internet.
The other party is not here: it's really Ye Qingjie. Many things in that era are gone.
Fish, fish, fish, fish: I downloaded it last year, and I feel it's OK.
Some people also thought of many things in that era.
Uncle Dou: Full of memories, it reminds me of the first online game I played - Network Creation.
Drunken water: in those days, miranda im was studied every day, and now it is all WeChat.
Automatic reply to Robert 001: At that time, I just downloaded vk and applied to add your friend.
QQ's Big Brother
Tencent's QQ chat software, called OICQ in the early days, was modeled after ICQ. The extra letter "O" is the abbreviation of Opening, representing more open ICQ. It was later renamed QQ in 2000.
It is reported that Tencent hesitated to do QQ, mainly because it could not see the opportunity to make money. They have no idea. There are also several Chinese versions of ICQ on the market. Tencent had its first heated debate on this matter. Ma Huateng finally clapped the board.
The first version of OICQ - OICQ 99 beta build 0210 was officially released on February 10, 1999.
According to Tencent Biography, all founders had the impression that there was no ceremony on that day. Before the release, Ma Huateng and others reserved 200 numbers, starting from 10201. "The first 200 numbers were left to us, and we thought that 200 reserved numbers would be enough to meet the needs of staff growth in the next decade or eight years.". Ma Huateng reserved No. 10001 for himself.
In April 1999, OICQ had 500 online users. By November, the number of users had exceeded 1 million. At the beginning of the launch, in order to retain users, Ma Huateng often changed his avatar to dress up as a girl. When he saw the registration of new users, he immediately approached them, but was often seen through.
In 2003, QQ Show was launched. QQ users can use QQ coins to buy clothes, accessories and environmental scenes to design their own personalized virtual images.
The popularity of QQ shows is beyond everyone's expectation. In the first half of the year when QQ Show was launched, 5 million people bought this service, with an average cost of about 5 yuan, which is far more than the cost of buying a "hot number". Since then, QQ has made a great leap forward, taking Tencent into the familiar look.
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