After 28 years, the first pioneering ICQ software in Israel – the global start-up nation – will close in about a month. The four founders of the company just wanted to play ping pong together in the basement of an apartment and within two years they reached the top of global high-tech. By the way, this is the first social network in the world (before Facebook) that got the name – the “Messenger”.
Mark Zuckerberg received the fame (and also the money) as the one who initiated the first social network in the world, but those who know about the technological world know that the first social network was really invented in Israel in 1996. It was called ICQ. which also became the first Israeli exit.
ICQ, the messaging software developed by the Mirabilis company was then sold in 1998 (two years after its establishment) to the American giant AOL for 407 million dollars. A legendary amount at the time that ignited the imagination of many young people in Israel and turned the geeks from OUT to IN.
Yair Goldfinger, Eric Verdi, Sefi Vigeser and Amnon Amir became millionaires and celebrities – their pictures with their long hair, glasses and strange t-shirts flooded the headlines of the newspapers in Israel (there were only newspapers).
In their twenties, each of them was suddenly worth more than $100 million in cash.
By the way, two years later Mirabilis could be sold for both a billion and four billion dollars.
Inspired by that group, the successful series “Masoderim” was created (starring Assi Cohen, Assaf Harel, Eran Zarahovich and Maor Cohen) which was broadcast on Keshet on Channel 2 in 2007. The success of the series in the first season led to its renewal for a second season of 11 episodes that aired in 2009. In January 2016, the series was sold to the British Channel 4.
During the series, the four manage to fulfill their material fantasies, from real estate choices and buying luxury cars, to the pleasures of the upper millennium, but still struggle on their way to happiness in life.
Back to the real story – when the group started meeting in the basement of Amnon Amir’s house somewhere in ’96 they of course had dreams, but not wild ones as the reality turned out later. The first meetings were not sophisticated brainstorming at all. They just played ping pong on the big table in the spacious basement. Each of them worked at a different company, but over time the four began toying with the idea of joint development.
The original idea of the young people was to connect the pagers to the Internet. What is a pager? It was the pre-cell phone device, for those who wanted to be connected outside the home. The pager made it possible to send short messages accompanied by a beep (“beep”) that were usually required by the media to the call center where a message was left for the subscriber. The idea of the Mirabilis group was to develop a solution that would make it possible to send the message from the Internet directly to the subscriber’s pager without going through the service center. The intended product name was Met-A-War.
While developing, they needed all partners to be connected to the Internet at the same time (in those years there was no Wi-Fi and connecting to the Internet was a complex and very slow operation. How slow? Between a message and an acknowledgment you could go to advertisements).
At some point, he got tired of calling all the partners every time to say “connect to the Internet now” and thus the world’s first software for instant messages was born which laid the first foundations of what would develop over the years into social networks.
The quartet decided to develop a tool that would allow each of them to know when the others are connected to the network and later, of course, came the thought of sending messages from one to the other. The pager went online and became much smarter. “We could have just as well gone for another idea, we didn’t even have time to think about how big it would be. It was the hand of chance that came on the side of the road,” the founders of Mirabilis would later testify, “we were within 24 hours of doing it.”
From the moment they realized they had something in hand, the group locked themselves in the basement for 18 hectic months of development, at the end of which ICQ was born.
The realization that they have something very powerful in their hand should be credited to Yossi Verdi, the father of the partner, Eric Verdi, and one of the leading and fascinating figures of the Israeli and global technology world in general – who has since been crowned as the “Godfather of Israeli high-tech” as well as the “start-up guru” Epim the world”.
Yossi Vardi, who had a lot of experience in the field of technology and had contacts in the world even then, was actually the one who realized the potential and allowed young people to connect with the giant company AOL, which was then the queen of the world of communication and the world’s Internet.
ICQ, which for the first time offered a direct and immediate connection between end users on the Internet, was not particularly complicated to develop, but on the other hand, it needed many resources as it developed mainly to meet the costs of durable and stable servers that would not collapse under the load of users that the founders had hoped for. The Mirabilis guys needed a strong financial backing to push them and quickly, before the competitors hit the market with their solution.
All the giants in the field of communication were then in a race for new users. The potential numbers presented to them by Yossi Vardi ignited the imagination of the AOL people and negotiations began. The “kids” stayed in Israel and Vardy the father went to the USA to get the best price for the first Internet start-up in Israel.
The greatness of ICQ was that it spread itself by word of mouth. Users, many of whom of course were in Israel in the first phase, simply sent friends an invitation to install in order to communicate with them. Thus, already at the time of sale and without special marketing efforts and without advertising, the software had 850 thousand users. For a wide public suddenly there was a real and essential use channel on the Internet. Back then, many websites did not exist yet and the network itself was mainly used by the scientific and business community.
After the sale to AOL, what was given the familiar name since “Messenger”, lived up to all expectations with close to a million installations per month in ’98 until it reached 100 million registered users at its peak in 2001.
At the beginning of the 2000s, smart phones entered the picture, ICQ was unable to adapt to the market, and simultaneously with changes in management, the addition of advertisements and additional features to the service, it began to lose its popularity. Simpler or more updated instant messaging services replaced it: Microsoft Messenger, Google Chat and in later years – WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook’s instant messaging service.
In 2010, Mirabilis (and ICQ within it) was sold to the Russian company DST, in a deal worth about 190 million dollars – half of the amount that AOL bought it for just a decade earlier. The attempt to push ICQ as a local and personalized service for Russian-speaking users did not succeed, and the number of users slowly declined. In 2022 ICQ had about 11 million monthly users. Just to compare, WhatsApp already had more than two billion monthly users.
Bottom line, no one has used ICQ in years. But the beloved application occupies a large place in the nostalgia of the Israeli network. It will always be remembered as an essential part of the development of interpersonal communication on the Internet, and we will probably never be able to forget our personal numbers. 54514267, disconnects.
The founders have since gone their separate ways. Vigeser and Goldfinger moved into the real estate sector. The whole group religiously avoids exposure except for Yossi Verdi who has been the guru of the startup world in Israel ever since. He invested in more than 50 startup companies, and many of them were sold or issued – which earned him the nickname “the father of high-tech exits” The Israeli”.
After almost three decades, the announcement was published on the ICQ website that “ICQ will stop operating as of June 26”. Users are asked to switch to the messaging platforms of VK, the Russian company that bought ICQ from AOL in 2010.
