The idea for instant messaging—now used by an estimated 316 million people—was born in the Israeli city of Herzliya in 1996 during a ping-pong match among four unemployed 20-somethings—software engineers Amnon Amir, Yair Goldfinger, Arik Vardi and Sefi Vigiser. As the friends traded backhands, they threw out ideas for an invention that would allow Internet users to chat in real time with others who were online.
They called their instant messaging program ICQ—shorthand for the phrase “I Seek You.” While the name of their startup company, Mirabilis, means “marvelous” in Latin, there wasn’t anything marvelous about convincing businessmen that their money wasn’t about to be dragged into the trash can. “It was very difficult to get people to invest,” recalls Yossi Vardi, Arik’s father, a prominent venture capitalist who put up the initial seed money for Mirabilis and became its marketing guru.
That fall, the inventors—minus Amir, who went off to university—set up shop in San Jose, California, to take advantage of Silicon Valley’s superior Internet infrastructure. They hauled their own computers more than 7,000 miles to save money, slept on Salvation Army mattresses in a makeshift office and subsisted on a Golden Arches diet because McDonald’s was the only place open late enough. “We entered what we call our submarine period,” Goldfinger, one of the media-shy inventors, told The Jerusalem Report. “The whole of San Jose closes down at 8 p.m., so we had nothing else to do besides getting the program up and running on the Internet and testing it.”
Just seven weeks after they gave the program to 40 friends, the number of ICQ users shot up to 65,000, as people flocked to download the freebie off the Web. “It surprised us that we got so many in so little time,” Vigiser said at the time. “But we’re not surprised at the number of people. It’s designed to be a global solution for millions.” Since Mirabilis had no advertising budget, ICQ’s popularity spread instead by “word of mouse.” Users were encouraged to recommend ICQ to their friends through a novel marketing strategy dubbed “viral marketing,” which has become ubiquitous. (Just think of the “send this article to your friend” option on most media sites.)
By the time the popular America Online bought Mirabilis for $287 million in cash in 1998, ICQ boasted 12 million registered users, with a million more joining every 22 days. The American giant had already launched its own AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) program, but was eager to snatch the more popular ICQ and its users. The sale made Mirabilis an Israeli legend and ICQ’s long-haired and Birkenstock-wearing inventors, two of whom hadn’t finished high school, were national sensations. “The whole thing boomed across Israel like an electric current,” says Yossi Vardi. “It ignited the imagination of geeks and nerds. It looked so easy—all you had to do was come up with a computer invention. People were changing careers even.” A bumper sticker—“I didn’t invest in Mirabilis either”—appeared, and international investors flocked to the country’s “Silicon Wadi” in search of the next big Internet breakthrough.
Today, there are many instant messaging programs, from veterans like AIM and Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger to newcomers like Skype and Google Talk. But ICQ, as the pioneer, has achieved a cult following. Available in 18 languages, including Hebrew and Japanese, it has added new features such as video and voice talk, and caters to youth with a slew of interactive games. Its admirers love its little yellow Post-it notes that announce the arrival of new messages, and the typing noises that serenade those tapping away at their replies. Die-hard fans have even composed songs in the program’s honor, using ICQ’s unmistakable soundtrack.
One Russian tune posted on the video-sharing web site YouTube goes, “ICQ ooohh ooohh…I have been waiting for the message for so long.”
According to a 2006 Associated Press-AOL online survey, almost half of all American teens use instant messaging compared to less than a quarter of adults. Guided by its younger users, and to the dismay of language purists, instant messaging has spawned a revved up shorthand of the English language. “K TTYL POS” means “OK, talk to you later, parent over shoulder,” and the ever-popular “LOL” (“laugh out loud”) has already invaded everyday speech. Naomi Baron, a linguistics professor at American University in Washington, DC, says that talk of IM’s negative influence on English is overblown. “When they’re older, in late high school and in college, students’ IM tends to look a lot like their formal writing,” she says.
Will the topic of discussion change from the virtues of the dorm “QT” (cutie) to debates of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as graduation nears? Who knows? All that we can be sure of is that instant messaging will be there to let inquisitive minds chat in real time. In the meantime, its four Israeli inventors are back home (though shuttling back and forth to the United States) working on their next projects: Amir is pursuing a Ph.D. in biology and has invested in other computer companies; Goldfinger is spearheading interactive advertising called “direct messaging”; Vardi has founded a company devoted to wireless home control technology, and Vigiser is working on a video broadcasting startup. ICQ may be their most popular invention so far but, as Vigiser once put it, “We thought that ICQ would be something we’d start with and then we’d do something else, because it looks small for us.”
