Essay Preview: Icq
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ICQ is a revolutionary, user-friendly Internet tool that informs you whos on-line at any time and enables you to contact them at will. No longer will you search in vain for friends or associates on the Net. ICQ does the searching for you, alerting you in real time when they log on. The need to conduct a directory search each time you want to communicate with a specific person is eliminated.
ICQ was developed in 1996 by Mirabilis, the creators of the first fully functional internet-wide Instant messenger comprising presence, buddy list and rapid messaging was founded by four young Israelis. America Online (AOL) acquired Mirabilis for $287 million in cash. On December 19, 2002, AOL Time Warner announced that ICQ had been issued a United States patent for instant messaging.
ICQ 5 was an upgrade on ICQ Lite – a divergence from the main ICQ program that has a big addition – Xtraz, which now offers games and features appealing to the younger users of the internet. ICQ Lite was originally an idea to offer the lighter users of instant messaging an alternative client which was a smaller download and less resource-hungry for the (then) relatively slow computers.
Although innovative at the start, the general trend of ICQ updates has been towards bloatware. Users have by and large migrated to the competition: MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, Skype, and Google Talk.
ICQ lets you choose the mode of communication you wish to employ. Regardless of the application, be it chat, voice, message board, data conferencing, file transfer or Internet games, ICQ will get your entire message across in real time. ICQ supports a variety of popular Internet applications and serves as a Universal Platform from which you can launch various peer- to- peer applications such as Netscape CoolTalk. It can also be used in a multiple-user mode, so groups can conduct conferences or just hang out on-line. The