It also didn't work for people who were behind NAT, I think, and leaked the remote parties IP... so there may have been many people who used ICQ at that time but never saw that functionality.
I like it, and to this day there are some friends that I talk to using talk by sshing into a common host, just because the realtime typing is nicer.
Edit: googling it I found someone else that remembered it: https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/2w4evp/comme...
Edit2: https://liferay.dev/blogs/-/blogs/10-reasons-to-switch-forwa... number 4