Slashdot Mirror
Thousands of ICQ Numbers Deleted
BondGamer writes "Many ICQ users woke up and found their ICQ numbers were no longer working. There is a topic on the ICQ support with more than 1,500 replies. There are pages upon pages of other topics asking what happened. As of yet, there has been no official response from AOL about what has happened."
I'm from central Europe, and here everybody is using ICQ. It's gone so far that ICQ is synonymous with IM, and people exchange ICQ UINs instead of phone numbers...
.. I at least won't start it with disgust anymore.
Same in Eastern Europe, although Skype appears to be catching up as a replacement.
Just few days ago I was talking to friends about the new ICQ6, and the conversation went along the lines of:
ME: you gotta check the new ICQ, they dumped the silly flash voice/cam, the terrible horn and oh-oh sounds. It's a lot better.
THEM: great! so are you switching back to ICQ (note: they are all on ICQ)
ME: no, but
And just as I gave them this compliment (it is a compliment! i hated the damn thing), now this story runs. They're out of luck, for sure.
Apparently everyone and their dog use it in Russia. Right before they turned GAIM into Pidgin I installed GAIM 1.5 and logged on to my neglected yahoo and ICQ accounts. My 6 digit ICQ was still working up until this morning, and every single day I get at least 3 Russian girls (or so they claim) wanting to chat, and at least 2 spam messages in Cyrillic trying to get me to click in some shady URL that I wouldn't touch with Firefox barricaded behind the Proxomitron and a Firewall on an unpluged computer powered-off =P
At least one of the alleged Russkys I actually started chatting with is cute. They sure know how to make them in the Ukraine ;)
+Raider of the lost BBS
It seems that certain IMs just gained popularity in certain parts of the world for whatever reason. I was in the Philippines a few months ago and yahoo is the "IM synonym" there. ICQ used to be the big thing in my circle of friends back in the late 90s (it was pretty much the ONLY thing back then). Then moved to yahoo for a while (does ICQ even have webcam support in 2007?) and its sort of settled on MSN as my non-geek friends started to pile up. Don't really know why that came to be -- whether its just because its packaged with Windows or because they had far superior webcam support for a while there, or perhaps some other factor -- as I was one of the last people I know to switch up to MSN (back in my "lets hate on M$ cause its cool" party-lining days:P).