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I don't know if this has a name, but... ICQ-like "searchable" instant messaging. Let me explain myself. In the late 90s, there was an IM client called ICQ. For

I don't know if this has a name, but... ICQ-like "searchable" instant messaging. Let me explain myself. In the late 90s, there was an IM client called ICQ. For starters, its UI was leaps and bounds ahead of anything to be seen in the next decade, and it had functionality like bots or groups, that has again become widespread a few years ago. But what I'm talking about is the fact that I could look for "female, age between 16 and 20, who likes writing, RPGs and electronic music and is available for chat" and results would come up. You could enter your data, interests, hobbies, etc. in the program and mark yourself as available (only if you wanted) and it was a really nice way to meet people. I collected stamps at the time so I remember I would search for people who were stamp collectors in countries for which I had no stamp, leading to stamp exchanges apart from some interesting conversation (as you could also throw some of your interests in in the search window). I thought that was the future and the tech could only get better from there, but then came MSN Messenger, with really bare-bones features in general and in particular no "searchable" functionality, and displaced ICQ. And since then, nothing similar has appeared. Instant messengers are focused on talking to people you already know, and if you want to meet new people, you have to use specific-purpose communities or dating sites. But good luck finding someone who likes writing, RPGs and electronic music at the same time... That function of searching people by interests in a huge directory of people (not restricted, e.g., to a dating site) is what I thought would take the world by storm, and as far as I know it doesn't even exist anymore at enough scale to be meaningful, at least in the West (maybe in WeChat, QQ or one of those apps used in Asia they have something similar, I don't know).

azeirah 9y ago
I had some succes with Omegle. They support a feature where you can select a topic you're interested in.
- dabockster 9y ago
  > Omegle Too many people named Dan.
muzani 9y ago
I thought the same thing too. It's quite sad that talking to people is usually limited to dating, and dating has become a domain of Tinder. I remember an era when chat rooms like IRC had thousands of people online at a time. It didn't scale past this, but it was very exciting. Maybe there is a market for something like a real-time Reddit, but it's a lot harder to pull off because there needed to be many people on at the same time before it could but critical mass.
- wrinkl3 9y ago
  There's definitely a huge demand for less dating-oriented ways to meet people online. > something like a real-time Reddit Reddit did that with Robin, their April's Fools Day experiment two years ago. It randomly connected small groups of the participating redditors in chatrooms, and would gradually merge the chatrooms if the majority of the users voted to do so. It was a lot of fun while it lasted, but I don't think anyone managed to successfully replicate it since.
- owebmaster 9y ago
  I guess it is because we stay online 24 hours now but in the past connected time was a scarce commodity. I felt bad if whenever I found that I was online but wasn't connected to my IRC channels, losing all the history :(
- sah2ed 9y ago
  Real-time Reddit like ChatRoulette ? https://www.chatroulette.com/ https://www.chatroulette.com/
herbst 9y ago
Facebook Graph search was like this (and creepier as people didnt always know _how_ they are searchable) nur Facebook heavily crippled this in the Last years.
- wrinkl3 9y ago
  I remember when Facebook hyped the Graph search as the next big thing, a truly social search engine. Years later I only occasionally remember about its existence when trying to find someone/something specific on Facebook, and even then it's at most mildly helpful.
- hans_mueller 9y ago
  FG probably would allow advertisers to bypass FB products for identification of potential customers and hence is not in best financial interest of FB.
- underwater 9y ago
  Graph Search always surfaced relevant information that explained why they matched a search. For example “Friends who visited London” might say “Checked in at Tower Bridge” below a result. You’re right that people didn’t understand Facebook’s privacy model. People assume that privacy by obscurity is a guarantee. Never mind that anyone could write a bot that did what Graph Search did. Graph Search was actually more conservative than it needed to be to avoid surprises. In the end that all mattered less than the fact that it wasn’t solving a problem people had.
  - herbst 9y ago
    Graph search was a lot deeper than any bot ever could. At some point you could match against likes that were set private on profiles. 'girls between 20 and 25, that like drum and bass and visit [location]. Was a actual query that enabled finding pretty much any girl I saw at any party. Without further Infos.
- Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
  Interesting. I haven't even tried Facebook Graph search as I think it never even became available in my country. But I think the main difference is probably that in Facebook, it's generally not socially OK to contact strangers. In ICQ, you could set and communicate explicitly if you wanted to be contacted by strangers or not (and if not, you weren't searchable).
hans_mueller 9y ago
this is how I met my until now best friend about 15 years ago.
- dabockster 9y ago
  > until now I'm sorry to hear that.
  - krsdcbl 9y ago
    German grammar - he really means he hasn't found a better friend so far
6ue7nNMEEbHcM 9y ago
I loved the chat interface similar to the unix talk command.
pjc50 9y ago
> "female, age between 16 and 20, who likes writing, RPGs and electronic music and is available for chat" This is probably the reason it was abandoned.
- anon1253 9y ago
  I don't get this. Dating apps are incredibly popular, and it would be opt-in. If it's the age bucket you're concerned with, I met some of my best friends online during that time (female and male). Adolescence is just like that. I understand that harassment, intimidation and general annoying behavior are a concern. But, if we reached the phase where "two random people can't have a normal conversation if they both wish to" is the default stance then we all need to take a good hard look at ourselves, technology is not going to solve that one.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - pjc50 9y ago
    I should probably have written a lot more than one sentence there. You're absolutely right about the benefits of meeting randoms on the internet, and clearly it still happens and works for some people. But it always did have social scaling issues - as a particular system or chatroom got more popular the success rate fell. I also worry that the culture has changed. "On the internet" really isn't a place apart from everyday life now, and we have a giant all-encompassing social network. And a dating app. As one of the sibling comments points out, once such a system becomes popular it's also going to be a target for spammers. If there have been any advances in chatbot AI over the past couple of decades that is also likely to make the problem worse.
- Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
  You only got found if you explicitly marked yourself as available for a chat, which was an opt-in choice that could be easily toggled on and off, or left off all the time if you just wanted to use ICQ to chat with your friends as current IMs are used. And you could omit information, e.g. you could fill in your hobbies but not gender if you didn't want to be found by gender. And the privacy settings were much more understandable and transparent than in e.g. Facebook. I guess there would be creeps, as anywhere where you can be exposed to unknown people, but I don't think the problem was worse than elsewhere. In fact, in my later experiences in chats, dating sites, etc., most women seemed to be (understandably) on the defensive due to the amount of stalkers and creeps they had to endure regularly, and in ICQ it didn't seem so much that way, I got plenty of conversations, girls (and guys) giving me their address for exchanging stamps or letters, etc., which I found much harder later in other media. Although maybe it's that both the Internet and myself were young and naive back then. Anyway, if stalkers did become a big problem, surely the tech could have improved to deal with it. There are probably several factors, but I think the main reason it was abandoned is simply network effects. MSN Messenger rose for reasons orthogonal to this, and then no one of the main IMs that succeeded it implemented this. Sadly, the question of what IMs gain more traction depends more on network effects than actual quality (see Whatsapp vs. Telegram, etc.)
Firegarden 9y ago
I am certain we could easily create this using websockets and p2p browser data streams... whos coming with me? Crowd fund me and i will release a prototype
- Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
  OK, I only ask for 10% of the profits for giving you the idea :) Just kidding. I would definitely support such a crowdfunding within my modest means. The problem is that I don't think the tech is the main issue (after all, ICQ did it with 90s tehc). Obtaining an userbase is the main issue, and network effects go against new contenders.
  - senatorobama 9y ago
    Not to mention.. dick picks.
    - greggman 9y ago
      That's actually a good point in the sense that when ICQ was popular most people didn't have a digital camera in their pocket with instant upload capability so sending a dick pic would have been way more trouble. Maybe the fact that pretty much everyone has a digital camera in their pocket now means the world has changed into a world where ICQ as the OP described it just can't exist anymore
      - Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
        Definitely, the context changes and brings new challenges... but I don't think that's unsolvable. I can think of low-tech solutions (allowing only text, not pictures, until the other person explicitly allows pictures) and high-tech solutions (dick recognition via neural networks).
timothevs 9y ago
Ha. I met my wife on ICQ, looking for people to practice my German with.
- elcapitan 9y ago
  How did you "meet" people on ICQ, was there a discovery functionality? I used it too, but only for chatting with people I knew and whose account ids were known to me..
  - vazamb 9y ago
    The parent literally explained how you meet people
    - elcapitan 9y ago
      Thanks!
Elvewyn 9y ago
Hm, omegle sort of has that. Put in interests and find anonymous strangers with those interests. I met a guy to play Dota 2 with in 2012 and we've been friends since.
adrianmsmith 9y ago
Right, Skype had a similar interface in 2005-2010, you could set your status to "Skype Me" (in addition to "Available", "Away" etc.) which was the green "available" Skype icon but with a smiley overlaid. You could search for people by age, gender, location, and I think keywords, and "only Skype Me users" (also implying online at that time). I'm not sure if the interest searching was as advanced as you described but the feature was great. You could then chat to the people you found, or call them, etc. After a few years, setting your status to "Skype me" meant every few minutes a chat from a new person advertising porn sites or other scams. So I stopped using it. Presumably so did everyone else; at some point they disabled the feature. And now Skype is just a tool to talk to people you already know.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
pryelluw 9y ago
I met my wife on ICQ after using the same search method you described. :)
- cisanti 9y ago
  Met my first love but didn't get married. Congratulations!
  - cableshaft 9y ago
    Same. First love and first heartbreak. She took awhile to get over. I ended up sabotaging quite a few opportunities with women I had during my freshman year of college because I still wasn't really over her.
- edkennedy 9y ago
  I lost my virginity through ICQ!
antjanus 9y ago
one thing people still don't remember from ICQ was the ability to collaborate / live message. Ie. edit text in a shared environment. It was bonkers. You could be writing and someone else could change the font options for it. and type at the same time, even delete your messages. I loved it. And this was back in 2000 maybe.
Jaruzel 9y ago
I mainly blame Facebook for this, but these days it's now viewed as seedy and odd to try and be friends with strangers across the internet. Each new 'social service' that now appears is not only silo-ed by it's own protocol, but also promotes the continued siloing of users into their own (existing) friendship groups. Back in the day (yeah, I'm old), you could drop into an IRC channel of strangers and be having a good conversation within minutes[1]. ICQ, as mentioned, had a 'find friend' feature, and many other early social platforms encouraged like-minded strangers to interact. So we all end up just talking to the same 20 or people we've always spoken to, re-enforcing the echo-chamber-effect, and never introducing new ideas and viewpoints into our lives. --- [1] IRC these days, if you are lucky to find an active channel, is now so cliquéy that any interlopers are largely ignored.
- wils1245 9y ago
  Definitely agree with your point about it being odd to get in touch with perfect strangers, but it's a great tool for promoting acquaintances to friends. I recently had a small house party and organized a ski trip, and Facebook allowed me to very easily invite people I didn't very well. It can be a great low pressure, non-intrusive, but genuine way to try and bring people into something.
- okreallywtf 9y ago
  You make a good point that I haven't really thought of (in quite that way). Anonymity used to be really fun on the internet in the early days for me, meeting strangers, playing games or whatever. Now so much is tied to us directly and to real-life that the thrill of exploration is kind of gone from the internet to me.
wils1245 9y ago
I think as others have mentioned, spam is a big problem, but the more fundamental problem with this idea is supply/demand. For a sufficiently large system, the number of people that are interested in talking to person X about topic Y isn't likely to be well matched with the number of people person X is interested in talking about topic Y with. Dating sites, while not what you want, are very illustrative. On open messaging platforms like OkCupid, in which anyone can message anyone, women are barraged with messages from men that want to talk about sex. How do you filter them out? If you do manage to filter them out, how do you surface a reasonable number of good conversation matches? The only solution I've seen in this thread is offering opt-out. But all that's doing is offering people a way to not use a product, it's not fixing the problem. Even relatively well funded and mature dating sites solve this by either offering finicky filter options to users, or really blunt filters (women have to initiate the conversation).
anjc 9y ago
Facebook worked like this up until recently, and now sort of works like this. "females who are single, age between 16 and 20, who likes writing" would have returned precise results.
Tharkun 9y ago
Maybe I'm just a nostalgic old geezer, but that was kind of socialising was my favourite thing about the internet. It's a shame I haven't been able to experience it in over a decade. It was so incredibly easy to find and talk to new people. It seems like everything about the current internet makes that deliberately harder. Even sending e-mail to strangers is hard now, you'll likely end up in their spam folder.
- brokenmachine 9y ago
  Spammers ruined it for everyone. :-(
  - Tharkun 9y ago
    Spammers, the lack of punishment for spammers, and the tech community's response to spammers.

azeirah 9y ago

I had some succes with Omegle. They support a feature where you can select a topic you're interested in.

dabockster 9y ago
> Omegle Too many people named Dan.

muzani 9y ago

I thought the same thing too. It's quite sad that talking to people is usually limited to dating, and dating has become a domain of Tinder. I remember an era when chat rooms like IRC had thousands of people online at a time. It didn't scale past this, but it was very exciting. Maybe there is a market for something like a real-time Reddit, but it's a lot harder to pull off because there needed to be many people on at the same time before it could but critical mass.

wrinkl3 9y ago
There's definitely a huge demand for less dating-oriented ways to meet people online. > something like a real-time Reddit Reddit did that with Robin, their April's Fools Day experiment two years ago. It randomly connected small groups of the participating redditors in chatrooms, and would gradually merge the chatrooms if the majority of the users voted to do so. It was a lot of fun while it lasted, but I don't think anyone managed to successfully replicate it since.
owebmaster 9y ago
I guess it is because we stay online 24 hours now but in the past connected time was a scarce commodity. I felt bad if whenever I found that I was online but wasn't connected to my IRC channels, losing all the history :(
sah2ed 9y ago
Real-time Reddit like ChatRoulette ? https://www.chatroulette.com/ https://www.chatroulette.com/

herbst 9y ago

Facebook Graph search was like this (and creepier as people didnt always know _how_ they are searchable) nur Facebook heavily crippled this in the Last years.

wrinkl3 9y ago
I remember when Facebook hyped the Graph search as the next big thing, a truly social search engine. Years later I only occasionally remember about its existence when trying to find someone/something specific on Facebook, and even then it's at most mildly helpful.
hans_mueller 9y ago
FG probably would allow advertisers to bypass FB products for identification of potential customers and hence is not in best financial interest of FB.
underwater 9y ago
Graph Search always surfaced relevant information that explained why they matched a search. For example “Friends who visited London” might say “Checked in at Tower Bridge” below a result. You’re right that people didn’t understand Facebook’s privacy model. People assume that privacy by obscurity is a guarantee. Never mind that anyone could write a bot that did what Graph Search did. Graph Search was actually more conservative than it needed to be to avoid surprises. In the end that all mattered less than the fact that it wasn’t solving a problem people had.
- herbst 9y ago
  Graph search was a lot deeper than any bot ever could. At some point you could match against likes that were set private on profiles. 'girls between 20 and 25, that like drum and bass and visit [location]. Was a actual query that enabled finding pretty much any girl I saw at any party. Without further Infos.
Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
Interesting. I haven't even tried Facebook Graph search as I think it never even became available in my country. But I think the main difference is probably that in Facebook, it's generally not socially OK to contact strangers. In ICQ, you could set and communicate explicitly if you wanted to be contacted by strangers or not (and if not, you weren't searchable).

hans_mueller 9y ago

this is how I met my until now best friend about 15 years ago.

dabockster 9y ago
> until now I'm sorry to hear that.
- krsdcbl 9y ago
  German grammar - he really means he hasn't found a better friend so far

6ue7nNMEEbHcM 9y ago

I loved the chat interface similar to the unix talk command.

pjc50 9y ago

> "female, age between 16 and 20, who likes writing, RPGs and electronic music and is available for chat" This is probably the reason it was abandoned.

anon1253 9y ago
I don't get this. Dating apps are incredibly popular, and it would be opt-in. If it's the age bucket you're concerned with, I met some of my best friends online during that time (female and male). Adolescence is just like that. I understand that harassment, intimidation and general annoying behavior are a concern. But, if we reached the phase where "two random people can't have a normal conversation if they both wish to" is the default stance then we all need to take a good hard look at ourselves, technology is not going to solve that one.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- pjc50 9y ago
  I should probably have written a lot more than one sentence there. You're absolutely right about the benefits of meeting randoms on the internet, and clearly it still happens and works for some people. But it always did have social scaling issues - as a particular system or chatroom got more popular the success rate fell. I also worry that the culture has changed. "On the internet" really isn't a place apart from everyday life now, and we have a giant all-encompassing social network. And a dating app. As one of the sibling comments points out, once such a system becomes popular it's also going to be a target for spammers. If there have been any advances in chatbot AI over the past couple of decades that is also likely to make the problem worse.
Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
You only got found if you explicitly marked yourself as available for a chat, which was an opt-in choice that could be easily toggled on and off, or left off all the time if you just wanted to use ICQ to chat with your friends as current IMs are used. And you could omit information, e.g. you could fill in your hobbies but not gender if you didn't want to be found by gender. And the privacy settings were much more understandable and transparent than in e.g. Facebook. I guess there would be creeps, as anywhere where you can be exposed to unknown people, but I don't think the problem was worse than elsewhere. In fact, in my later experiences in chats, dating sites, etc., most women seemed to be (understandably) on the defensive due to the amount of stalkers and creeps they had to endure regularly, and in ICQ it didn't seem so much that way, I got plenty of conversations, girls (and guys) giving me their address for exchanging stamps or letters, etc., which I found much harder later in other media. Although maybe it's that both the Internet and myself were young and naive back then. Anyway, if stalkers did become a big problem, surely the tech could have improved to deal with it. There are probably several factors, but I think the main reason it was abandoned is simply network effects. MSN Messenger rose for reasons orthogonal to this, and then no one of the main IMs that succeeded it implemented this. Sadly, the question of what IMs gain more traction depends more on network effects than actual quality (see Whatsapp vs. Telegram, etc.)

Firegarden 9y ago

I am certain we could easily create this using websockets and p2p browser data streams... whos coming with me? Crowd fund me and i will release a prototype

Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
OK, I only ask for 10% of the profits for giving you the idea :) Just kidding. I would definitely support such a crowdfunding within my modest means. The problem is that I don't think the tech is the main issue (after all, ICQ did it with 90s tehc). Obtaining an userbase is the main issue, and network effects go against new contenders.
- senatorobama 9y ago
  Not to mention.. dick picks.
  - greggman 9y ago
    That's actually a good point in the sense that when ICQ was popular most people didn't have a digital camera in their pocket with instant upload capability so sending a dick pic would have been way more trouble. Maybe the fact that pretty much everyone has a digital camera in their pocket now means the world has changed into a world where ICQ as the OP described it just can't exist anymore
    - Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
      Definitely, the context changes and brings new challenges... but I don't think that's unsolvable. I can think of low-tech solutions (allowing only text, not pictures, until the other person explicitly allows pictures) and high-tech solutions (dick recognition via neural networks).

timothevs 9y ago

Ha. I met my wife on ICQ, looking for people to practice my German with.

elcapitan 9y ago
How did you "meet" people on ICQ, was there a discovery functionality? I used it too, but only for chatting with people I knew and whose account ids were known to me..
- vazamb 9y ago
  The parent literally explained how you meet people
  - elcapitan 9y ago
    Thanks!

Elvewyn 9y ago

Hm, omegle sort of has that. Put in interests and find anonymous strangers with those interests. I met a guy to play Dota 2 with in 2012 and we've been friends since.

adrianmsmith 9y ago

Right, Skype had a similar interface in 2005-2010, you could set your status to "Skype Me" (in addition to "Available", "Away" etc.) which was the green "available" Skype icon but with a smiley overlaid. You could search for people by age, gender, location, and I think keywords, and "only Skype Me users" (also implying online at that time). I'm not sure if the interest searching was as advanced as you described but the feature was great. You could then chat to the people you found, or call them, etc. After a few years, setting your status to "Skype me" meant every few minutes a chat from a new person advertising porn sites or other scams. So I stopped using it. Presumably so did everyone else; at some point they disabled the feature. And now Skype is just a tool to talk to people you already know.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

pryelluw 9y ago

I met my wife on ICQ after using the same search method you described. :)

cisanti 9y ago
Met my first love but didn't get married. Congratulations!
- cableshaft 9y ago
  Same. First love and first heartbreak. She took awhile to get over. I ended up sabotaging quite a few opportunities with women I had during my freshman year of college because I still wasn't really over her.
edkennedy 9y ago
I lost my virginity through ICQ!

antjanus 9y ago

one thing people still don't remember from ICQ was the ability to collaborate / live message. Ie. edit text in a shared environment. It was bonkers. You could be writing and someone else could change the font options for it. and type at the same time, even delete your messages. I loved it. And this was back in 2000 maybe.

Jaruzel 9y ago

I mainly blame Facebook for this, but these days it's now viewed as seedy and odd to try and be friends with strangers across the internet. Each new 'social service' that now appears is not only silo-ed by it's own protocol, but also promotes the continued siloing of users into their own (existing) friendship groups. Back in the day (yeah, I'm old), you could drop into an IRC channel of strangers and be having a good conversation within minutes[1]. ICQ, as mentioned, had a 'find friend' feature, and many other early social platforms encouraged like-minded strangers to interact. So we all end up just talking to the same 20 or people we've always spoken to, re-enforcing the echo-chamber-effect, and never introducing new ideas and viewpoints into our lives. --- [1] IRC these days, if you are lucky to find an active channel, is now so cliquéy that any interlopers are largely ignored.

wils1245 9y ago
Definitely agree with your point about it being odd to get in touch with perfect strangers, but it's a great tool for promoting acquaintances to friends. I recently had a small house party and organized a ski trip, and Facebook allowed me to very easily invite people I didn't very well. It can be a great low pressure, non-intrusive, but genuine way to try and bring people into something.
okreallywtf 9y ago
You make a good point that I haven't really thought of (in quite that way). Anonymity used to be really fun on the internet in the early days for me, meeting strangers, playing games or whatever. Now so much is tied to us directly and to real-life that the thrill of exploration is kind of gone from the internet to me.

wils1245 9y ago

I think as others have mentioned, spam is a big problem, but the more fundamental problem with this idea is supply/demand. For a sufficiently large system, the number of people that are interested in talking to person X about topic Y isn't likely to be well matched with the number of people person X is interested in talking about topic Y with. Dating sites, while not what you want, are very illustrative. On open messaging platforms like OkCupid, in which anyone can message anyone, women are barraged with messages from men that want to talk about sex. How do you filter them out? If you do manage to filter them out, how do you surface a reasonable number of good conversation matches? The only solution I've seen in this thread is offering opt-out. But all that's doing is offering people a way to not use a product, it's not fixing the problem. Even relatively well funded and mature dating sites solve this by either offering finicky filter options to users, or really blunt filters (women have to initiate the conversation).

anjc 9y ago

Facebook worked like this up until recently, and now sort of works like this. "females who are single, age between 16 and 20, who likes writing" would have returned precise results.

Tharkun 9y ago

Maybe I'm just a nostalgic old geezer, but that was kind of socialising was my favourite thing about the internet. It's a shame I haven't been able to experience it in over a decade. It was so incredibly easy to find and talk to new people. It seems like everything about the current internet makes that deliberately harder. Even sending e-mail to strangers is hard now, you'll likely end up in their spam folder.

brokenmachine 9y ago
Spammers ruined it for everyone. :-(
- Tharkun 9y ago
  Spammers, the lack of punishment for spammers, and the tech community's response to spammers.