Several independent efforts are underway to save ICQ from extinction… as are MSN, AIM, Yahoo! and more.
VOD | 28/05/24 | FF'ni XIV | Feat: @littlepoppet6
The recent news of ICQ shutting down seems to have surprised many who didn't realize it was still going on. AOL sold the service to Digital Sky Technologies back in 2010, and Reg FOSS counter — once known to his friends as 73187508 — verified that old accounts still worked.
However, all is not completely lost. Most of the instant messenger protocols of the 1990s have been open for decades, whether officially or not. AOL connected its two services in 2002, and Apple's original messaging app iChat for the then-new Mac OS X used the AOL AIM protocol.
The OSCAR protocol is fairly well documented although it remains officially proprietary. Those annoying, disrespectful Linux programmers reversed it a long time ago to create the GAIM client, which was already available 18 years ago.
