As ICQ logs off for good, a look back at popular instant messaging apps over the years

SINGAPORE, June 29 — Many young internet users today may not have heard of ICQ , but back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was just about the biggest online messaging platform around.

Users who registered for an account would be assigned a unique identification number, which grew longer as more people jumped onto the platform. “Seeing so many other users online at the same time made me feel part of a community,” he told TODAY. “That time, I was active with mIRC as well. So whenever I made a new online friend, the first question was, ‘Do you have ICQ?’Calling the ICQ closure “bittersweet”, Mr Liew said that ICQ was his first social media platform and it will “remain in a special place”.

Ms Archita Biswas, 40, recalls first using the chat platform during her post-graduate studies in 2005 at an internet cafe.“It gave a new meaning to express my feelings through emojis at that age. The sadness, happiness, mood swings — all got a new level of meaning and expressing them became so easy.”

Yahoo! Messenger introduced the concept of personalised avatars, where users would be able to change an avatar’s appearance to best fit their personalities. It proved to be a success as MSN Messenger had more than 29 million registered users worldwide in early 2001, making it the most-used instant messaging service in the world, Microsoft said.

She vividly recalled the “nudge” feature that allowed users to “shake” their friends’ app screen “to alert them of our messages if they did not respond after some time”. In May 2011, Microsoft bought Skype for US$8.5 billion and integrated Windows Live Messenger into the app.

Source: Tech Daily Report (techdailyreport.net)

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