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Comments: 136 + -   Russian Company Buys ICQ on Saturday May 01, @12:13PM

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday May 01, @12:13PM
from the end-of-a-market-strategy dept.
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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."
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Submission: Russian company buys ICQ by Anonymous Coward
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  • Also widely popular among spammers.

    I still have my ICQ account (seven-digit UIN starting with 1, woo) but pretty much the only traffic it gets anymore is spammers trying to add me and trying to send me IMs. Trillian fortunately blocks the latter for me.

    • I still have my ICQ account (seven-digit UIN starting with 1, woo)

      *yawn*, I have a six digit one starting with '2' I don't think it has received a valid non-spam message in three years ago.

      • Re:Very popular (Score:5, Funny)

        by Scaba (183684) <joeNO@SPAMjoefrancia.com> on Saturday May 01, @01:02PM (#32057014)

        *yawn*, I have a six digit one starting with '2' I don't think it has received a valid non-spam message in three years ago.

        double *yawn* I have a negative account number that's also an irrational number. I receive messages from the future.

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by sentientbeing (688713)
          Mine ends in an i, its an imaginary number in the complex plane and I receive messages from another dimension.
        • I have my own enumeration constant so they can handle my account as a special case- with that 90% of the code that runs only 10% of the time.
      • Mine is a 9-digit prime number. Do solicitations from Russian hookers count as spam or porn?

      • Yeah 6 digit ... but starting with 3 :(

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by yotto (590067)

          Not only do I not remember my password, I don't remember my user name, email, or any other identifying characteristics from my account. And I think it's a pretty low number because I remember signing up as soon as I heard about the service which easily could have been in 1996.

          Oh well, I guess I'm better off living the past dozen years or so without all that spam.

          • I have very limited memories... after so many years in a coma, upon regaining consciousness they had to teach me once again to speak, to walk, to eat, to log into my ICQ account.... unfortunately I never made a full recovery.

    • Same here; it's pretty much a spam wasteland. I still have the account credentials in Pidgin, but disabled the account for the past 3 years because only spammers used it.

      I'll have to say this for ICQ though - their feature to store offline messages server-side was a feature far beyond what AIM had or even has now.

      My UID was 282026638. Funny how some numbers just stick in memory.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 (520050)

      I have 2 accounts, one with a 6 digit uin and another with 8 digits - only the shorter one seems to get spammed...
      Using numbers its trivially easy to spam, simply increment then number to work out addresses... Perhaps they don't bother going all that high.

    • I haven't used ICQ in ages. It was the most important part of my life about 10-8 years ago but now not so much. I still remember my pw and UID which is 5600178. Not quite as low as your but it's my second one. That said I am certain my first UID was above 1,000,000. I, unfortunately, was not able to have net access as early as some and certainty not as early as when they were dialling into BBSes (I assume) on the "The facts of life" sitcom. Yes I am aware it is sad when you can remember early sitcom nerdine

  • I still use ICQ (Score:2, Redundant)

    by Ark42 (522144)
    I still use some OLD version of ICQ on Windows 7, because I never found another client that behaves as nicely. All the 3rd party stuff I've tried either failed to connect to the ICQ servers or failed basic features like file transfer or the ability to communicate with AIM screen-names from an ICQ account. Also, this ICQ client still has no ads and never pops up a chat screen overtop of anything else I'm doing. I frickin hate it when those other clients steal window focus even when you're typing in an unrela

    • Re:I still PREFER! ICQ (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Marc_Hawke (130338) on Saturday May 01, @12:35PM (#32056808)

      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Hurricane78 (562437)

        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

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Hurricane78 (562437)

        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.)

      • I'm not sure if I would call it super fast email. ICQ has multi-user chat which was awesome and the AIM, MSN, etc came about and they did not have functionality at first. TBH, I only moved away from MSN because of my frineds who went to MSN. If it weren't completely useless minus friends I would go to Google Talk / ICQ but no one really uses those.

    • Trillian Astra: http://trillian.im/ [trillian.im]

      -Stays connected
      -Supports file transfer
      -Communicates with AIM from ICQ
      -No ads
      -Multiple options for what happens with new chat windows (show on desktop, show minimized, hide and notify via systray, with an additional "always show on top" toggle)

      All ICQ-specific features: http://www.trillian.im/learn/tour-features.html#ICQ [trillian.im]

    • But does anyone else at this point?

      its day has come and gone.. partially due to the ads and unstable clients. But no, no one will learn from those mistakes.

      • 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. AIM and MSN had ads yet remained popular.

  • Largely forgotten by the Slashdot demographic maybe - but that tiny and self selected slice of the demographic pie is hardly representative.

  • Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 01, @12:26PM (#32056748)

    UhOh!

  • IIRC, the only private information put into your ICQ account was your password. 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. In short, will ICQ and AIM be able to communicate together still, and will ICQ remain usi

  • Technical details? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Phroggy (441) <slashdot3NO@SPAMphroggy.com> on Saturday May 01, @01:03PM (#32057020) Homepage

    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?

  • In Soviet Russia... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Beelzebud (1361137) on Saturday May 01, @01:34PM (#32057294)
    In Soviet Russia, Q seeks I.
    • Actually, QCX (read the last as greek letter Chi - which I've always been told is the K sound followed by long I sound)

  • Am I missing something? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by darkpixel2k (623900) <slashdot@darkpixel.com> on Saturday May 01, @02:12PM (#32057656) Homepage

    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.

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

  • Alive and well in Germany (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Neoprofin (871029) <neoprofin&hotmail,com> on Saturday May 01, @03:00PM (#32058068)
    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.
  • ICQ was killed by microsoft's o/s monopoly just like netscape. since messenger started to be pushed in windows installations, icq users dwindled speedily. soon we were left to a group of 'elite' people, who were there before instant messengers first came out, while the masses were on messenger. due to business needs, we eventually had to migrate to messenger. most of us hated it, and we still hate it. thankfully googletalk came, but it is still relatively unknown.

    i very much think eu should slap ms with

  • What's 187.5 million for a dead IM network ? :P

    I was one of the early ICQ users in the 90s, 6-digit UID, yadda yadda. It was ground-breaking for the time, but that time has come and gone. Everyone I know moved to MSN Messenger, and ICQ pretty much died overnight.

    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.

  • i was reminded of ICQ when google first showed of wave. 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.

    • Re:Well, given the tons spam from that region (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MrNaz (730548) on Saturday May 01, @12:55PM (#32056956) Homepage

      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.

      • 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)!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Trogre (513942)

        That may be so, but nearly all ICQ spam I receive contains links to websites ending with .ru

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          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 mo

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by shutdown -p now (807394)

            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 (o

    • Now that a company there owns it the quality of the spam may actually improve and the volume decrease. It seems that way with LJ. Hell I'd pay them for my ICQ account if A) I got no spam B) I got preferential treatment when they have to clobber people off their servers.

    • I believe AIM is the most popular protocol in the US. MSN is more popular in the UK and surrounding areas.

        • Sadly, the post above isn't a troll. I don't know anyone who uses AIM, nobody uses ICQ anymore (was different 10 years ago), nobody uses Yahoo Messenger either.

          So it's either MSN, email or all that Facebook/twitter/etc crap.

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