This is the best summary I could come up with:

But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it simultaneously laid the groundwork for direct messaging and social networking as we came to know it in the post-Facebook era.

In the wake of the Netscape IPO, which heralded a new era of tech-based money-making ventures, the four of them were looking for an idea to run with.

The application didn't have much marketing behind it, but it spread quickly by word of mouth—particularly in nascent online gaming communities around multi-user dungeons (MUDs), early deathmatches, and so on.

ICQ was eventually purchased by AOL, and it lost ground to more heavily financially backed services like AIM and MSN.

That company eventually morphed and changed its name to VK, and it has been keeping ICQ on life support as a sort of Russian Skype alternative since.

I signed up because I was playing the online game Meridian 59, and its community largely used ICQ for out-of-game communication.

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