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This post made me wonder what happened to ICQ. "(2010) AOL has sold ICQ to Digital Sky Technologies (DST), Russia's largest Internet company, for US$187.5 mill

by bcx 6y ago

This post made me wonder what happened to ICQ. "(2010) 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." (https://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/05/01/1516234/russian-company-buys-icq https://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/05/01/1516234/russian-com...)

DangerousPie 6y ago
Note: "remains widely popular" was already arguable when that story was written in 2010 and is definitely not true in 2020.
- dvirsky 6y ago
  At least in Israel no one was using it after ~2005 or so.
- mike_d 6y ago
  (Legacy) ICQ has widespread adoption in the criminal underground. If you were a security service it probably had the highest signal to noise ratio of any network.
spxans 6y ago
Some more context: DST was renamed to Mail.Ru Group, and is now owned by one of the russian oligarchs (Alisher Usmanov). They also control all the largest russian social networks (some like VK through hostile takeovers) and is widely reported to pipe all the data directly into russian secret services
- zkid18 6y ago
  DST remains the notable VC investor.
oblib 6y ago
>>This post made me wonder what happened to ICQ. Same here... I haven't even thought about it since the turn of the century! I only used it a couple times. A colleague asked me to install it so we could work together on a project. If I recall right I started getting messages from people I didn't know so I deleted it shortly after installing it.
chrisjc 6y ago
Interesting note... Tencent owns QQ. QQ was originally called OICQ, Open ICQ. There was a great acquired episode on Tencent. https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/season-3-episode-10-tencent https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/season-3-episode-10-tencent
konart 6y ago
>it remains widely popular in Central Europe, Russia, and Israel. They have like 200k users now, lol
micah63 6y ago
My take on it is that when MSN Messenger came out, they stored the contacts "in the cloud" (which was a new concept back then). So let's just say hypothetically that Windows 95 crapped the bed with a true blue screen of death, you'd re-install MSN Messenger and bam, your contacts were back. ICQ kept contacts local and if you lost them, you lost them.
- ianbooker 6y ago
  True, but they caught up within one year and had the feature. Then they heavily bloated the client, then released a "lite" version which really brought them back on the map. Then facebook came and suddenly it was cooler to communicate non-instantly for some time. :)
  - outworlder 6y ago
    > it was cooler Cooler for some. Infuriating for others. Do you remember that feature that you could use to "call someone's attention"? It would make a lot of noise and the window would shake like crazy in your face. Found it. The "nudge" feature. https://youtu.be/9QrS2cEyNrA?t=70 https://youtu.be/9QrS2cEyNrA?t=70
    - easytiger 6y ago
      Yea, but that was a time when most people worked on desktops. Had no mobile phone or laptop.
    - artificial 6y ago
      That brings back memories, nudge bombing via client side automation / progs.
    - zerd 6y ago
      You could also invite anyone to a group chat, forcing them to join, and then you could nudge all of them at the same time. Best feature ever.
- aeyes 6y ago
basch 6y ago
AOL missed an opportunity to create a cross compatible family of AIM, YIM, ICQ. Different apps with different features, or different interfaces targeted at different audiences, that can all do roughly the same thing.
- treebornfrog 6y ago
  You might want to take a look at adium. It was the bees knees, I used it on mac years ago to manage multiple chats. Adium.im
  - tezzer 6y ago
    Ah, now I miss Meebo again, which was like adium but browser-based.
  - basch 6y ago
    Im saying the other way around. One protocol, 3 clients for 3 demographics.
empath75 6y ago
The sale was actually blocked by the federal government for a period of time and AOL continued to run the back end servers for icq until just a few years ago.
grishka 6y ago
> it remains widely popular in Central Europe, Russia It used to be popular in Russia to the point of being synonymous to instant messaging, but it's since been largely forgotten. My current circles use VK and Telegram. WhatsApp is also somewhat popular apparently but not so much around me. If ICQ ever pops up in conversations these days, it's always something nostalgic (also, back then no one used the atrocious official client).

by bcx 6y ago

DangerousPie 6y ago

Note: "remains widely popular" was already arguable when that story was written in 2010 and is definitely not true in 2020.

dvirsky 6y ago
At least in Israel no one was using it after ~2005 or so.
mike_d 6y ago
(Legacy) ICQ has widespread adoption in the criminal underground. If you were a security service it probably had the highest signal to noise ratio of any network.

spxans 6y ago

Some more context: DST was renamed to Mail.Ru Group, and is now owned by one of the russian oligarchs (Alisher Usmanov). They also control all the largest russian social networks (some like VK through hostile takeovers) and is widely reported to pipe all the data directly into russian secret services

zkid18 6y ago
DST remains the notable VC investor.

oblib 6y ago

>>This post made me wonder what happened to ICQ. Same here... I haven't even thought about it since the turn of the century! I only used it a couple times. A colleague asked me to install it so we could work together on a project. If I recall right I started getting messages from people I didn't know so I deleted it shortly after installing it.

chrisjc 6y ago

Interesting note... Tencent owns QQ. QQ was originally called OICQ, Open ICQ. There was a great acquired episode on Tencent. https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/season-3-episode-10-tencent https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/season-3-episode-10-tencent

konart 6y ago

>it remains widely popular in Central Europe, Russia, and Israel. They have like 200k users now, lol

micah63 6y ago

My take on it is that when MSN Messenger came out, they stored the contacts "in the cloud" (which was a new concept back then). So let's just say hypothetically that Windows 95 crapped the bed with a true blue screen of death, you'd re-install MSN Messenger and bam, your contacts were back. ICQ kept contacts local and if you lost them, you lost them.

ianbooker 6y ago
True, but they caught up within one year and had the feature. Then they heavily bloated the client, then released a "lite" version which really brought them back on the map. Then facebook came and suddenly it was cooler to communicate non-instantly for some time. :)
- outworlder 6y ago
  > it was cooler Cooler for some. Infuriating for others. Do you remember that feature that you could use to "call someone's attention"? It would make a lot of noise and the window would shake like crazy in your face. Found it. The "nudge" feature. https://youtu.be/9QrS2cEyNrA?t=70 https://youtu.be/9QrS2cEyNrA?t=70
  - easytiger 6y ago
    Yea, but that was a time when most people worked on desktops. Had no mobile phone or laptop.
  - artificial 6y ago
    That brings back memories, nudge bombing via client side automation / progs.
  - zerd 6y ago
    You could also invite anyone to a group chat, forcing them to join, and then you could nudge all of them at the same time. Best feature ever.
aeyes 6y ago

basch 6y ago

AOL missed an opportunity to create a cross compatible family of AIM, YIM, ICQ. Different apps with different features, or different interfaces targeted at different audiences, that can all do roughly the same thing.

treebornfrog 6y ago
You might want to take a look at adium. It was the bees knees, I used it on mac years ago to manage multiple chats. Adium.im
- tezzer 6y ago
  Ah, now I miss Meebo again, which was like adium but browser-based.
- basch 6y ago
  Im saying the other way around. One protocol, 3 clients for 3 demographics.

empath75 6y ago

The sale was actually blocked by the federal government for a period of time and AOL continued to run the back end servers for icq until just a few years ago.

grishka 6y ago

> it remains widely popular in Central Europe, Russia It used to be popular in Russia to the point of being synonymous to instant messaging, but it's since been largely forgotten. My current circles use VK and Telegram. WhatsApp is also somewhat popular apparently but not so much around me. If ICQ ever pops up in conversations these days, it's always something nostalgic (also, back then no one used the atrocious official client).