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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.
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)!
Right, because you can only find honest people and companies in the Glorious USA.
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