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ICQ Starts Blocking Alternative Clients
An anonymous reader writes "It appears that since yesterday ICQ has blocked access to the ICQ network to alternative clients. Users of QIP, Adium, and other clients are getting a 'The client version you are using is too old. Please upgrade'. No comment yet from ICQ or AOL."
In other news... people still use ICQ?
Didn't we just a few months back hear about AOL Adopting Jabber (XMPP)? If AOL is seriously looking towards joining the non-legacy IM network, maybe this is just the latest in a long line of effort to de-emphasize and eventually scuttle ICQ in favor of something a little more modern. Or maybe not. One can dream though.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
The summary is wrong. They don't block alternative clients but an old version of the protocol. Alternative clients that emulate the current version are fine.
Well, on the topic of forcing people to upgrade... maybe if the newer software wasn't so retarded, more people would upgrade. Just a thought.
Admittedly my anecdote isn't comprehensive marketing data and isn't that new either, but just to illustrate a point. So at one point I wanted to communicate with someone who supposedly had only ICQ.
The last version I had used before was, IIRC, 2002a. Or something. At any rate, it was a relatively clean interface, with just the two text-fields needed, and the minimum of buttons that one might need. All in the Windows configured colours, and with sensible icons that are there, but don't scream for attention and don't look like someone flew an airplane into a clown makeup factory. I'm not necessarily a fan of ICQ or AOL, but I could respect that interface.
Well, I figured, wth, let's get the newest version. You know, what with potential security holes and whatnot in older versions. I think the version at the moment was ICQ 4. "With Xtraz!" The l33t (ok, SMS-speak) spelling in a product name should have been warning enough. It was everything that the old version wasn't: retarded and annoying and looking like a desperate scream for attention. IIRC with an ad banner thrown in for good measure too.
I actually went "oh, fuck the security holes, that's why I have an anti-virus and data execution check turned on." I actually uninstalled it and dug through old backup CD-R's to find my trusted old version.
Well, I uninstalled it completely after a few days and never looked back. So I wouldn't know if the even newer versions fixed that or continued down that slope towards software-Alzheimer's.
But just saying... if you find that you have to _force_ people to give up their old versions and use the newer one, even when it's for free (as in beer;)... there may be some subtle hint in there.
And yeah, I know there are other programs one can use instead of the official client. They're just kinda irrelevant for the point I was trying to make, which is about AOL making the users of its official client upgrade.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
ICQ, the one IM app that doesn't send you a message every time someone hits enter, it promotes that they should finish their idea first before clicking the Send button, so the recipient doesn't have to read the same line over and over because they keep seeing blinking or hearing "message received" noises. The only blinking you see with this program is a tiny icon in the system tray instead of multiple taskbar panes blinking in a very distracting un-synchronized way.
Yes, you can configure your clients differently, but I'm talking about the default behavior. And even if you are courteous enough to not set it to send your message every time you press enter, your friends won't, and you'll still be getting one-liners that could have waited until they were finished typing their whole idea.
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