Today, I can relate even more so than ever to my ICQ-skeptic self from 1997 though.
And then ICQ was invaded and subverted by Russia. I mean pervasively. Just like LiveJournal was, later on.
I have come to believe that these were simply psyops that were a bit less anticipated than TikTok was.
Imagine the power of Russian threat actors knowing when and where every kid was online and wanting to chat, and who all their friends were.
...not... really...? I mean, it's the 9th-most-populated country in the world, so when it comes online, it's something people notice. Just like when Nigeria did a decade or so later.
What happened with ICQ is that AIM became available separately from AOL dialup, and AIM was a lot more "instant". Remember, circa late-90s, the default ICQ message flow was to double-click a flashing tray icon, click "reply", type your message, and click "send". Or tab-space if you were a badass keyboard warrior.
AIM - by default - had a persistent window, where sending messages was accomplished with the enter key. Simple as.
You could tinker with ICQ and get it to be a bit more AIM'y (though you still had to tab-space to send), but tinkering was required.
So despite the fact that ICQ had a lot more features than AIM, a better and more reliable file transfer, a far more robust and better-granulated status system*, if you wanted to talk to non-nerds in your high school, you had to use AIM.
* AIM was just "online" and "away" combined with active/idle; ICQ had - from memory, so I may be forgetting one - online, away, not available, DND, free-for-chat, and "private", where only users you chose could see your online status. Plus, you could also show as offline to certain other users without actually blocking their messages!
> Just like LiveJournal was, later on.
LiveJournal was bought by a Russian company in 2007. ICQ was bought by a Russian company in 2010.
> I have come to believe that these were simply psyops that were a bit less anticipated than TikTok was.
I enjoy yelling at clouds as much as the next old man, but come on.
> Imagine the power of Russian threat actors knowing when and where every kid was online and wanting to chat, and who all their friends were.
I'm... imagining it. It's not really that impressive, but I'm imagining it. I mean, "between 3pm local time and bedtime, all-day on weekends and holidays; less than this as the nerd-factor diminishes" is pretty much the answer. I'm hard-pressed to decide what a scary scary Russian bogeymen could really do with the information that I was friends with Jake and Mike, on uneasy mutual detente terms with Ramon, trying to get a smooch from, in sequential order, Jessica, Jaime, Jo, Becky, and Helen; and wouldn't talk to anyone who listed N*SYNC or that British "Spice Girls" psyop as a Favorite Band.
But if any creepy-crawly super-scary Russian threat actor bogeymen are reading this, by all means let me know - my curiosity is officially piqued. Just make sure you don't have any Di$ney movies in the Favorite Movies of the profile of whichever account you contact me from. You'll be auto-blocked >: |
Someone made the observation back then that 'the less you talk about "being online", the more important it will be'. Nowadays, because of IP-over-radio (smartphones) we're all basically online all the time (which has been true to a certain extent for a while with (dumb) phones and SMS/texting).
But it goes further now with many more ways of interaction.
Around that time the book form became untennable so they started switching to CDROM versions [2]
[1] https://archive.org/details/luckmansworldwid0000unse_1997ed/... [2] https://archive.org/details/new-riders-www-yellow-pages-1997
Another surprising format:
I was starting my 'career' in 1999, in a Spanish TV production company. I remember a guy that had a business selling a 'curated' Netscape bookmarks collection. Can't remember the price, but the company paid for it, and he sent it in some physical format (diskettes?), and we imported it to our writers computers.
With Macromedia Director or similar, I'd guess.
The other 3 I had framed, and they have followed me everywhere I have lived ever since. Even non-technical people stop and enjoy them for a moment and say “wow, the Internet is huge” or something to that effect… and then they notice that they’re only seeing what it was a quarter century ago.
Our first week of operation, signing up users at a rate of 1000 - 2000 a day, I decided to check in on the servers I'd spent days getting ready for launch - USENET, DNS, Email, etc. Just for grins (because those were woolly days), I launched a network scope to see what the traffic was all about .. my naive enthusiasm for this "new era of knowledge and access to information" literally leaking out of my eyeballs .. only to discover, 90% of the traffic that our over-heating modem banks and under-provisioned 56k T-1 line, was all .. porn.
That was my first big reality adjustment with the Internet, and the beginning of my disinterest in the subject, as a commercial activity. I just didn't feel like it was worth it to do all that fuss and nonsense, only so that 90% of the traffic was boobs.
Well, I left that scene. If I'd stayed, I'd have raked in the cash, at least 3-figure millions (the guy I started it all with made something along those figures) .. but I definitely am glad I didn't have to spend years, afterwards, scaling to masturbation.
I know, I know, there's nothing wrong with it and we need to grant people the respect to exercise their rights (and lefts) whichever way they want. I just didn't personally want to be involved, and left to do other more productive things, like start one of Californias very first full-service web development agencies, and get Prime Sports Network their first live-sports event streaming on the Internet happening ..
Animats•9mo ago
Also, can this data collection see enough of internal China traffic?
maxmouchet•8mo ago
I've also played a bit with an interactive visualization of the graph by using map tiles [4].
[1] https://github.com/TheOpteProject/LGL
[2] https://github.com/maxmouchet/minilgl (cleaned-up version of the code)
[3] https://www.maxmouchet.com/internet-viz/
[4] https://github.com/maxmouchet/internet-visualization