What is ICQ?
| I Seek You |
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ICQ is a program you can download that will let you know when friends and contacts are also online on the Internet, page them, and chat with them. In order to get maximum benefit from ICQ, both parties must have downloaded the ICQ program and have received a user identification number (UIN). The download and registration procedure are simple and enable you to send messages, files (single, multiple or whole directories), and URLs directly to your friends' desktops. In addition, you can initiate an IRC-style chat session or voice and video-voice connection and play games with other ICQ members that you are in touch with. Your contact is signalled of an incoming event as soon as it arrives and has immediate access to it. History of ICQ Mirabilis, the creator of ICQ ("I Seek You"), was founded in August 1996. Four months later, their product ICQ was deployed over the Internet. As soon as the product was on the market, hundreds and thousands of users started subscribing to the service. This chain reaction created one of the largest download rates for a start-up company in the history of the Internet. Mirabilis was the first to introduce a unique innovative propagation technique dubbed "word-of-mouse", enabling the users to propagate the program from within itself with the click of a button. Mirabilis also introduced a whole new philosophy related to the way people locate, learn the availability and alert each other as well as many of the features, design elements and fundamentals of the user-interface, functionality, and terminology. With a membership of 111,747,393 at the moment, ICQ is the largest online community, beating AOL Instant Messenge or MSN Messenger. One of the reason why ICQ was so successful was because ICQ was the only vendor of such a product until the beginning of May 1997. Seeing its success, American Online decided to buyout the Israel based Mirabilis on June 8, 1998. Under the terms of the acquisition completed June 5, 1998, America Online paid $287 million in cash to purchase 100% of Mirabilis's assets. So why would AOL purchase ICQ even though it has its own Instant Messenger? Some people have suggested that they want to "kill off the competition." Not likely, because after killing off ICQ they would then have to purchase all the rest of the free services like Excite PAL, Ding!, IChat and every other pager that the former ICQers would likely flee to. For every company AOL tried to acquire, a new one would form. The last thing AOL wants to do is kill off ICQ, on the contrary, they have every reason to see it continue to grow and improve.The reason why AOL has decided to purchase ICQ is for the membership, you, me, and the ICQ community. ICQ's homepage is one of the most popular site on the web. With this in mind, advertisements have sustained ICQ's operation cost for almost two years. Another potential within the ICQ community is the database. With 12 million users, the database for advertisement is quite huge. |
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