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."
UhOh!
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--
Just so you know, the US is still the number 1 spam source, both by number of spam relays and origin of spammers. There was a recent Slashdot article on this, and you can also check the ROKSO list if you're interested. Don't be spewing that "but our poor PCs are controlled by evil Chinese/Russians/Europeans/Eritreans who use our unwilling innocent users' PCs in their botnets" crap either. Most of the top 100 on the ROKSO list are American citizens.
Clean up your own backyard before you decide to make snarky comments about the Russians and Chinese. Yes, we know, they hate your freedom and they want to eat your babies, but nonetheless, try to stay factual.
I hate printers.
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.
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.
double *yawn* I have a negative account number that's also an irrational number. I receive messages from the future.
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;
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)!
Right, because you can only find honest people and companies in the Glorious USA.
sorry, have you ever visited Russia? Russian people are some of the warmest, friendliest people, who would bend over backwards to help you. just because you visited some shitty suburb of Moscow doesn't mean that the rest of the country is like that (and of course, you would experience the exact same thing visiting some awful area of St. Louis).
here you are: http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries.lasso . it's spam, not botnets (which are just as bad--why dismiss them?), and the US has nearly 5 times more active issues than Russia (which is absurd, even AFTER you correct for differences in population).
I don't know when s/he last used it but I am using it right now (version 2.6.6) and it still does all of what Feyr said ~~
In Soviet Russia, Q seeks I.
AOL has sold ICQ to Digital Sky Technologies (DST), Russia's largest Internet company, for US$187.5 million.
I connect to ICQ using Pidgin. I also connect to GTalk and a few XMPP servers using Pidgin. The XMPP server software is running on some version of Linux--probably Ubuntu or Debian. It was free to download, free to setup, and free to use. HOW THE #$*@# IS ICQ WORTH $187.5 MILLION?!?!.
Is the Windows ICQ client really a direct pipe for advertisers to watch your web surfing habits or turn on and view your webcam at random or something? How in the hell can you buy an instant messaging company for $187.5 million now-a-days? IM clients and servers are free.
There's no place like
The Germans seem to love it as well. I was living with a number of masters students and I was absolutely shitting bricks to here them talk about a program that I thought was completely wiped from the face of the earth a decade ago by MSN and AIM/Google.
It's moved on a lot from what it used to be, I think it might even support instant messaging now. Sad because the only thing I ever liked about it was that you leave people messages when they weren't online, sort of a hybrid email/chat.
It got replaced by NTSC.
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.