Comment by nodamage
10 years ago
> Not so long ago, it was revolutionary to be able to send messages to someone even when they were offline.
How long ago was that exactly? From what I remember, ICQ had offline messaging around 1997.
10 years ago
> Not so long ago, it was revolutionary to be able to send messages to someone even when they were offline.
How long ago was that exactly? From what I remember, ICQ had offline messaging around 1997.
I was one of the first 100k ICQ users. I was working on a similar idea at the time and so tried every chat client that I came across. I was really impressed with ICQ and somehow tracked down the phone number of one of the developers. I called him. He was an Israeli living with his sister in NYC. I think there were three other people involved, all developers. We chatted for a bit about the software and I remember telling him I was impressed.
Any, several couple months later they sold to AOL for something like $250 million. I was living in Chicago at the time and coincidentally the Hancock building had just sold for ~$280 million. I remember thinking that four guys had created as much value in a year as thousands of construction workers and real estate managers had created in three decades.
I actually talked to one of the developers recently thanks to an university course (Economics of Innovation).
Their story is very interesting :) , the founders were Arik Vardi, Yair Goldfinger, Sefi Vigiser and Amnon Amir.
We talked to Yair, from what he told us, they were using dial-up at the time, and they had to disconnect or use another phone line to know whether the others were online, and so they discovered a need for a tool to find if somebody was online, and enable communication between connected users.
They weren't very finance-savvy, fortunately for them one of their parents was, and he handled all the fundraising and stuff.
We used to have this technology called email which seemed pretty cool. You could even embed photos of your cat.
Did they ever fix the spammer problem on it?
Yes.
It's not realtime, though. You send your message and the other person gets it... in a few minutes.
Did the implementation depend on one or more intermediate servers always being online? If so, it isn't revolutionary.
All our email clients do is send it to our email servers. Try sending email out of your own machine. I doubt 10% would reach the destination inbox. The general assumption today is you don't run your own mail server. :(
It did. I remember wondering why all the "successors" didn't have that "basic" feature