It's a good time to remember the long-forgotten programs like ICQ and QIP, where the only thing left from the good old ICQ is the "o-ou" sound. They already had their own emojis and icons, and in the latest versions even their own qip.ru account. But I agree, it was a good thing! It made ICQ more comfortable and interesting. Just a plugin like the one that fetched the current song from Winamp and put the title in ICQ status was worth a lot!
It was amazing that ICQ had an open protocol that allowed you to write your own clients. I remember a rebellious one under Mandriva Linux that I built from source code. It took an enormous amount of energy. Especially later with the encodings. But what joy it was when everything started working stably!
In the picture is my honeymoon with Linux. I started making these kinds of screenshots before it became mainstream 
