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."

Comments

Re:I still PREFER! ICQ

[Marc_Hawke]

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.