ICQ is the first ever commercial instant messaging computer program, created by start-up Israeli company Mirabilis and first released in November, 1996. The name ICQ is a play on the phrase "I seek you".

In June 2004 ICQ celebrated its 300 millionth download from download.com where it remained the number 1 most popular download for 7 consecutive years.

ICQ was founded by Yair Goldfinger, Arik Vardi, Sefi Vigiser and Amnon Amir and managed by Ariel Yarnitsky .

ICQ allows the sending of text messages, URLs, multi-user chats, file transfers, greeting cards and more.

ICQ users are identified by numbers called UIN, distributed in sequential order (though it is rumored there are gaps in the sequence). New users are now given a UIN of well over 250,000,000, and low numbers (six digits or less) have been auctioned on eBay by users who signed up in ICQ's early days.

AOL acquired Mirabilis and ICQ in 1998.

ICQ 5 was released on Monday, February 7, 2005.

Clients

AOL's OSCAR network protocol used by ICQ is proprietary, but a number of people have created more or less compatible third-party clients, including:

• Adium - supports ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN and Jabber, for Mac OS X
• Ayttm - supports ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, IRC, and Jabber
• centericq - supports ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, IRC and Jabber
• Fire - supports ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, IRC, and Jabber
• Gaim - supports ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, IRC, Jabber and Gadu-Gadu
• GnomeICU (previously GtkICQ)
• Jimm (J2ME client, previously "Mobicq")
• Kopete
• Licq
• mICQ
• Miranda IM - plugin based, supports ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, BNet, and others
• Proteus - supports ICQ, Yahoo!, Yahoo Japan!, AIM, MSN, Jabber and iChat Rendezvous, for Mac OS X
• Trillian - supports ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, IRC, Jabber and others
• Yeemp - supports ICQ, AIM, and Yeemp
• YSM

AOL has recently begun making its ICQ software more AIM-like by adding AIM Smilies, as well as introducing cross AIM/ICQ communication. Users on ICQ are able to communicate with AIM users, however such capability is in beta stages.

See also

• List of instant messengers
• Comparison of instant messengers
• QQ - a separate Chinese instant messenger and network which had its previous name, OICQ, in conflict with ICQ.

External links

• The Official ICQ Website
• The History of ICQ
• Free ICQ Skins
• Unified Instant Messaging over IPv6: A brief introduction on Instant Messaging and its products, followed by a description of some Peer-to-Peer systems and platforms. Then the IETF standards on Instant Messaging are presented. Finally, a framework for Agent-based Unified Instant Messaging over IPv6 is proposed.