created: 2002-02-12
modified: 2002-11-16

Stefan.Huberdoc.at

(outdated) Instant Messaging

comp / techblog / ...

[ PSI and ICQ ]

This page is merely a collection of thoughts (and some facts) about instant messaging (widely only referred to as ICQ).

ICQ' rise (and fall?)

Instant Messaging has become quite popular with the invention of Mirabilis' ICQ (I seek you) Protocol. Unfortunately, this protocol is not standardized. The company (AOL/Mirabilis) can change it whenever they feel like changing it. Many people are currently still using ICQ, but several problems arose with recent protocol changes:

• Clones don't work: Several Clones (Miranda-ICQ, licq, lxicq, …) do not always work properly. Due to the changes in the protocol, the developers are forced to sniff the traffic, and reverse engineer the protocol. This is not a simple task and might take time. Too much time. It would be mean to suspect, that the ICQ protocol is be changed as soon as working clones exist, but this conclusion is close at hand.
• Not all platforms are supported: http://www.icq.com/download/opsystem.html. What should users do, who have Linux installed? Or MacOS X? Or FreeBSD? Or BeOS?

Little addendum (Thanks to Geoff Morris for pinpointing me): Trillian seems to cope with the ICQ protocol. I tried it and uninstalled it after some hours again. I will not return to ICQ, anyway. If you want to stick to ICQ (Trillian supports multiple protocols), give it a try. Drawback: Yet, there are only Windows clients.

The problems, one finds with any ICQ Clone range from simply not being able to connect to receiving duplicate messages, or not being able to send messages at all. This is quite a nuisance.

Solving the problem

One way to solve this problem is to download Mirabilis' latest clients. This is not accepteable for me. Maybe for others. I will not support this foulness any longer. This entails several problems, since communication with "ICQ-addicts" will not work properly for a while. But I do not care for that any more. If somebody wants to contact me via IM, (s)he will have to do it via other means.

Another way than continuing support for ICQ would be to develop an open protocol, that is standardized via RFC. There is one protocol that is already RFC-draft, but not yet standardized: Jabber.

Quick overview:

• Jabber is an open IM protocol based on XML
• Jabber is about to be standardized
• There are several clients for several operating systems
• Jabber uses "transports" to connect to other IM-protocols (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ).

I recommend taking a look at these websites:

• www.jabber.org: General info
• http://www.jabbercentral.com/clients/: Various clients to download

Unfortunately, the Jabber foundation has not yet succeeded in standardize Jabber: Jabber FAQ

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If you have any comments, corrections or contributions for me, please let me know by mail

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Using ICQ in PSI

As I could convince some of my friends to switch to Jabber, I have been asked for a good client. I am personally using PSI, written by Justin Karneges. This is merely personal preference because it has a small user interface.

Since I've also received a couple of questions about how to get all the ICQ-folks into the contact list, I decided to write the steps down to avoid repeating myself :)

Assumption: You are planning to install PSI, create a new JabberID and you want to get your old ICQ contacts into PSI's list.

The "easy" way is to download a tool that converts your contact list: http://jabbertools.sourceforge.net/ is one of them (I didn't try it, though). I am not sure if you might need to perform the ICQ registration manually (would be logical).

The "hard" way is to do it manually:

1. Get the latest version of PSI for your operating system from the PSI homepage.
2. Unzip (or install) it to any directory you want.
3. Run PSI.
4. You will be prompted for a username and password. If you do not yet have a JabberID, then choose a nickname. Which server you enter depends on what you want to do. Jabber provides so called Transports to communicate with other IM-protocols (such as ICQ or AIM). But not all servers have all transports installed. So take a look at Jabberview and decide, which server to take (If you want to chat with ICQ people you might use jabber.at, since it has ICQ transport installed).
5. click create. PSI will try to create the account. If your nickname is already in use, you'll receive an error.
6. Click on PSI's main menu and select Manage Services
7. Select the ICQ transport and press Register
8. In the following window enter your ICQ UIN and password. If the authentication is successful, you will notice a new contact in the group Agents/Transports. It is called icq.jabber.at in case you selected jabber.at as your server.
9. Click on PSI's main menu, then Add a Contact. You will notice the dropdown box at the top. Normally, reading the instructions on the left should do, but anyway: Choose the ICQ Transport and enter the UIN of the contact you want to add into the activated field.
10. press Get Jabber ID. Wait until the ID is there. Give it a name and click on Add.

Note: People you have authorized in ICQ before still can send messages to you. Just add them to your contact list, when they send you a message.

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Created: 2002-02-12 — last modified: 2002-11-16 — last update of web site: 2012-01-25
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