Slashdot Mirror
Russian Company Buys ICQ
An anonymous reader writes "AOL has sold ICQ to Digital Sky Technologies (DST), Russia's largest Internet company, for US$187.5 million. DST's offer was apparently more attractive than those of Russia's ProfMedia and China's Tencent. ICQ, originally released in 1996 and bought by AOL in 1998 for US$407 million, was one of the world's first major instant messaging systems. Although largely forgotten in English-speaking countries, it remains widely popular in Central Europe, Russia, and Israel. Moscow News has additional coverage of the deal."
"The company was forgetting what the "A" in AOL stands for (America, in case you forgot), losing its identity in a quick, worrisome desire to sprawl out in uncontrolled growth."----- Great there goes my ISP...and to think AOL was so fast. Insert "In Mother Russia" joke...
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
UhOh!
ICQ assumes multi-line messages. (No "send-on-enter" crap.)
Most clients allow you to configure Ctrl-Enter as submit shortcut. Then enter does create new lines.
Or if not possible, you can use Ctrl-Enter for multi-line messages, and Enter to submit. But it's hard and annoying.
And obviously, MSN is the exception, as its users would not have the mental capacity to imagine wanting something like that in the first place.
But unfortunately, this does not protect you from the retards ;)))
who
lol
write
their
messages
like
this
lol
inlucidng
no
puntcuatin
ro
preppr spelng.
Luckily, there still is per-user invisibility and ignore lists. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
double *yawn* I have a negative account number that's also an irrational number. I receive messages from the future.
Absurd, good sir.
America's culture of freedom and individual responsibility has made it a hotbed of unconventional electronic marketing entrepreneurs.
Godless elsewhereistan's degenerate criminality makes it a hive of spammer scum.
Get the Facts(tm)!
Mine ends in an i, its an imaginary number in the complex plane and I receive messages from another dimension.
------
beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
In Soviet Russia, Q seeks I.
It got replaced by NTSC.