Russian Company Buys ICQ 136
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."
Re:Well, given the tons spam from that region (Score:2, Informative)
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).
Re:I still use ICQ (Score:2, Informative)
Re:ICQ is still my main protocol (Score:0, Informative)
MSN is the most popular in Canada by far. AIM is for e-tards. ICQ is dead in NA. Yahoo Messenger was absorbed.
yup, MSN is basically the only decent way to keep in touch via IM. That and Facebook Chat.