ICQ

Mirabilis, an Israeli startup founded in June 1996 by Yair Goldfinger, Sefi Vigiser, Amnon Amir, Arik Vardi, and Yossi Vardi, released ICQ — “I Seek You” — on November 15, 1996, with no funding and no business model, just a free download. It solved a problem the internet hadn’t named yet: knowing when a friend was online, right now, and being able to say something to them instantly. The contact list, the presence indicator, the unmistakable “Uh-oh!” notification sound, the numeric ICQ identity that doubled as bragging rights for early adopters — ICQ invented the template that every messaging app since has copied in some form. It grew explosively, and by around 2001 had surpassed 100 million registered accounts, making it briefly the largest instant-messaging network on Earth.

AOL bought Mirabilis in June 1998 for $287 million up front plus up to $120 million more in earnouts, and ran ICQ as a semi-independent product for over a decade while MSN Messenger, then social-network messaging and smartphone apps, ate into its lead. AOL finally offloaded it in April 2010 to Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies (later Mail.ru Group, then VK) for $187.5 million, and from there ICQ shrank into a mostly Russian-market product, kept alive more by inertia and nostalgia than by growth — it even saw a brief 35-fold download spike in Hong Kong in January 2021 during a WhatsApp privacy scare. VK announced on May 24, 2024 that it was finally done: ICQ shut down for good on June 26, 2024, after almost 28 years, its remaining users redirected to VK Messenger. The company that taught the world to expect an instant reply outlasted its own relevance by about two decades before anyone bothered to turn it off.