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Russian Company Buys ICQ

Posted by Soulskill on from the end-of-a-market-strategy dept.

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."

5 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I still PREFER! ICQ by Marc_Hawke · · Score: 4, Interesting

    At least the ICQ style.

    ICQ assumes multi-line messages. (No "send-on-enter" crap.)
    ICQ has had offline-messages from the beginning.
    ICQ always kept message history.

    Those are the biggest two, but there are a bunch of other things that ICQ did right when the other IM companies did it wrong.

    AIM and MSN started out as 'super private IRC'. It behaves the same as the input line on an IRC channel.

    ICQ though is more like 'super fast email'. ICQ is a 'low overhead email', like Verizon's "Push To Talk" is a low overhead Cell Phone call.

    However, I admit that it's pretty much dead. The only people left that I still talk to are the same people I talked to back in 1998. All my family and 'new' friends are using a bunch of different networks. That's why I use a multi-network client (Miranda right now.).

    JABBER is the future though.

    --
    --Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
  2. Re:I still PREFER! ICQ by Hurricane78 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Oh, I forgot to mention:
    It’s wrong that ICQ is mostly dead. It’s mostly dead where you live. But luckily far from it everywhere else. :)
    I know children and teens who use ICQ. Some weren’t even alive when ICQ started.
    But it comes down to if their older friends and family used ICQ back then.

    Also: Jabber is now called XMPP, as far as I know. (I would have preferred it to be lightweight EBML instead of overhead monster XML.)

    --
    Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
  3. Technical details? by Phroggy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How does this affect things like being able to sign into AIM using an ICQ number, and adding ICQ numbers to your AIM buddy list?

    --
    $x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
    $x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
  4. Might as well sell it to the russians... by night_flyer · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Their hackers have stolen most of the older ICQ numbers (mine included)

    --


    Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
    Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
  5. Re:Well, given the tons spam from that region by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Russian people are some of the warmest, friendliest people, who would bend over backwards to help you.

    This isn't true, sorry. While GP was obviously wrong, so are you. Given the state of affairs in modern Russian society, you see people stepping over a dying man lying on a sidewalk without blinking an eye. Yes, those same people can be very friendly - to someone they know, not to strangers.

    In any case, I find that the whole business of ethnic stereotypes, both positive and negative, is largely mythological. I've been in a few places now, and while I did note the difference in overall politeness in public (on which scale the only two country I've seen ranking below Russia are Egypt and China, by the way), it seems to be coming more from quality of life and availability of education, rather than from cultural roots, and ethnicity doesn't matter at all - e.g. Canadians of black or asian ancestry are just as polite as their fellow white citizens.