Who owns icq

Think about how long ago that was Launched after less than two months of development from Israeli company Mirabilis, it predated and influenced many of the popular chat programs of the era including AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger. Incredibly enough, ICQ has also outlasted its chief competitors. ICQ offered a number of innovative features including multi-user chat, async offline messaging, resumable file transfers and a searchable directory.

This number I somehow still remember mine by heart some 20 years later , along with custom handles and an attached e-mail address, were used to search for other users on the platform. Mirabilis enjoyed first-mover advantage, attracting millions of early Internet users enticed by the proposition of chatting with friends and family in real-time. 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.

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. But luckily far from it everywhere else. But it comes down to if their older friends and family used ICQ back then.

The inept use of XML [cat-v. The second thing it did wrong was allow itself to be bought by AOL. Except for when they constantly popup those little "toast" messages telling you to buy the iPhone version, or to ask you to vote for them in some "best of whatever" competitions.

Don't get me wrong, I like Trillian enough that i paid for the pro version, but they still do some very annoying things. Also their xmpp support is very lacking. No bookmarks, and it leaves you disconnected from any chat rooms after it reconnects to the server when disconnected.

Which magical ICQ version are you using? But no, no one will learn from those mistakes. This is a German TV channel. Now, I don't remember what they were advertizing but my reaction was "wow, are Germans still using ICQ in !? Granted, in this part of Germany ex-eastern region still heavily depopulating they still have some retrograd customs.

I always thought the main reason for its decline was the use of sequential numbers as public IDs, making it easy for spammers to find new targets by brute force. Largely forgotten by the Slashdot demographic maybe - but that tiny and self selected slice of the demographic pie is hardly representative.

I have another one, but it's higher up than even your current one IIRC I don't remember the number, but I have the account set up on my other computer. Anything else was public. If you are a dope and use the same passwords for everything, then you probably have concerns. Other than that, I cannot think of any. But it is in Russia, and there are plenty of stories about what happens once your information gets there.

But more concerning is the potential disconnect from the Oscar protocol. I started using ICQ back in I think, anyway around then with an 8 digit UIN starting with I joined in late with a 7-digit number starting with 6, so with an 8 digit number you can't have joined before You definitely didn't join in - the service wasn't launched until Makes sense.

The whole period between and is a mostly blur to me. Then I discovered IRC, that was it for me. Not a quantum leap for me after having been in the ill-fated Q-Link rooms for years until the abrupt shutdown in I connect to ICQ using Pidgin.

It was free to download, free to setup, and free to use. 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? IM clients and servers are free. You're not buying the software, you're buying the customers who are locked into a proprietary system by network effects. Not sure how many people are on ICQ now.

Statistics I read eight years ago were about 6 million active users. Right--but those 6 million customers need to have some sort of value. That's why I asked if the Windows client was some sort of ad-ridden piece of garbage. Using Pidgin on Linux I've never seen an ad. I occasionally get some sort of russian spam, it's once or twice a month. How the hell do they get that multi-million dollar figure?

How are those users actually worth that much? In other words, if this new russian company liquidated 'ICQ', where would that money come from? I would rather much see the requirement for networks all of them to interoperate.

There's no technical reason why an ICQ user shouldn't be able to send and receive messages to MSN or AOL users - the servers would need to federate, but there's nothing magical or even particularly hard about it. It was ground-breaking for the time, but that time has come and gone. Me, I don't even bother with IM anymore. If I had a business use for it, I'd be fine, but for just keeping in touch with friends I'm quite content with Facebook and that century-old tech the telephone. This largely because ICQ had two ways to show conversations.

Either the now typical way with each line showing up in a common window. Or one where each character typed would be sent across so the other side could see you type in near real time. It also had keyboard sound effects, iirc. I guess, I'm not very social, I kept my MySpace site for only some month. I'm in keeping my mostly inactive LinkedIn account alive strictly for business networking. But even I have to chat, when email is overhead or not possible!

I knew instant messaging back at univeristy since by virtue of IRC and the chat facility of ICS internet chess, does it still exist btw? I think joined ICQ somewhere in or because "everyone did it", but had not much use for it.

The ICQ client then was quite decent. Of course the russians would want to buy out the main staple of their spamware enterprise.

What are you talking about? They only sold ICQ, an instant messenger client. They haven't gone out of business. Too bad the Russians got a hold of ICQ. Back to dreaming, I guess. Sadly, the post above isn't a troll. I was not trolling. You know, having lived in Germany most of my life, this reminds me of this being the general excuse of people who did not fight the Nazis back then.

Nobody uses MSN where I live. Most of the people never heard of it. There may be more comments in this discussion. Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to turn on Classic Discussion System in your preferences instead.

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Follow Slashdot on LinkedIn. 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. This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted. Full Abbreviated Hidden. More Login. Very popular Score: 2. Also widely popular among spammers. Re: Score: 1. Created by a group of Israeli college students who eventually formed the company Mirabilis to support development of the app, ICQ stood for "I seek you" and was intended as a way for Windows users to communicate much in the same way Unix users could send real-time messages.

It was a pretty basic app, and it lacked a lot of the security we now take for granted. Anyone could message you even if you were not on their friends list. Users were assigned a number rather than a user name like we have on Skype. This was before the wave of insane megadeals. By that point, we had a crowded IM market. Messenger, ICQ and a few other also-rans. Trillian came about around then to provide a single interface to all IMs—it now supports Google Talk, Facebook, Twitter, ICQ and other communication apps—but it lacks a lot of the features of the specific messaging apps.