Today (2024-05-25), it was announced that ICQ will be quietly buzzing, beeping, and Uh-Ohing off into the sunset, to be shutdown June 26.

Over a decade since it's launch to be something "please anything better" than IRC 1.0 at the time, I'm sure some of you are old enough to have 6 digit ICQ ids. Actually, I'm sure some of you have four digit IDs.

Maybe some of you have fond memories. Maybe like me, you never used it, but still want to raise a glass to it; one of the original protocols come to an end.

Used to use this to communicate with people on one of the huge mods I helped out with.
Good times!
Well... aside from the random cyrillic text message spam on occasion.

Well, good-bye ICQ. I won't miss you.

Never used the original ICQ client. There was something that put me off. Advertising maybe? Don't remember anymore.
Tried a few alternatives like open source Miranda IM. But i quickly grew tired of the constant interruptions during study & work. People just posting smileys or "Hello how are you?" to announce their daily online presence. Sigh. Dropped instant-messaging completely soon after. Not worth it.

I still use instant messaging, but the pace and flavor of it has changed majorly since the days of AiM/YahooIM/Skype.

Yeah, I used it a lot back then, It was very good and I remember it fondly, I stopped using it like more than 20 years ago in favor of some other multi client IM since people started spreading out on various flavors of them of other companies and it was inconvenient to have multiple IM running at once. Then at some time I didn't even bothered anymore with IM or chat clients.
One feature I liked was the real time chat windows: basically they updated live so you could see how the other person was typing, speed, corrections and so on.
I think I'm going to install it again on my smartphone just for the sake of nostalgia until the cut-off date.

And I thought I was cool and oldskool for using Skype still earlier this year, even with my work colleagues (and a couple of close relatives/friends)! I recall many, who heard that, being amazed Skype is still alive and in use by some people.

But times change, now I am not using Skype anymore (we use Slack at our work now), so cheers to ICQ too I guess.

I don't recall for sure if I have used ICQ in the past, but at least the acronym sounds familiar so maybe I have, at some point of time, when searching for some alternative to MSN Messenger or whatever... Are other, even currently used, messengers any better?

For instance, that darn WhatsApp. My close relatives and friends often wonder why I never seem to be reachable in Whatsapp. Because I couldn't care less for a restricted group of people sharing some silly photos or jokes, or my sister always posting a photo of some stupid sunset or a pizza she ate for lunch. Who cares?!?

So yeah I have Whatsapp installed on my phone due to the aforementioned people, but I have disabled that it can't send alerts to me because I got fed up waking up in the middle of the night when aforementioned people decided to make an update to the channel in wee hours. Get a life, people! Play some video games instead of harassing other people with nightly social media updates!

Maybe you're thinking of Gaim, which later became Pidgin?

Pidgin still exists, but it has the same problem the GNU Image Manipulation program has; being attached to nearly two decades of legacy code and having a developer who can't count to three.

Can't remember exactly, for sure I tried Pidgin but didn't like the interface, it was either Miranda or something else.

Found it!
It was Trillian! Now that I remember, used it for a while actually, was a good all rounder.

Requiem maybe?

I last used ICQ in 2002 or so, but I can inexplicably recall my ICQ number from back then. It was a big deal when I was into multiplayer gaming and the features were excellent for the time.

I used ICQ a long, long time ago.
It was actually so long ago already (easily 15 to 20 years), that it barely counts anymore.