what was icq as related to instant messaging
an instant messaging client
title: ICQ text: ICQ ICQ is an instant messaging client that was first developed and popularized by the Israeli company Mirabilis in 1996. The name ICQ derives from the English phrase "I Seek You". Ownership of ICQ passed from Mirabilis to AOL in 1998, and from AOL to Mail.Ru Group in 2010. The ICQ client application and service were initially released in November 1996 and the client was freely available to download. Users could register an account and would be assigned a number, like a phone number, for others to be able to contact them (users could also provide handles). ICQ was among title: ICQ text: the first stand-alone instant messenger and the first online instant messenger service — while real-time chat was not in itself new to the internet (IRC being the most common platform at the time), the concept of a fully centralized service with individual user accounts focused on one-on-one conversations set the blueprint for later instant messaging services like AIM, and its influence is seen in modern social media applications. Whilst Internet Relay Chat programs, like Pirch and mIRC, dominated the market for many years, their popularity began to fall in the face of mobile computing which had begun to take hold title: ICQ text: network protocol used by ICQ is proprietary and using a third party client is a violation of ICQ Terms of Service, nevertheless a number of third-party clients have been created by using reverse-engineering and protocol descriptions. These clients include: AOL supported clients include: ICQ ICQ is an instant messaging client that was first developed and popularized by the Israeli company Mirabilis in 1996. The name ICQ derives from the English phrase "I Seek You". Ownership of ICQ passed from Mirabilis to AOL in 1998, and from AOL to Mail.Ru Group in 2010. The ICQ client application and service were initially title: Web chat text: around for decades, almost as long as email. The first major web chat client that was used worldwide was ICQ. ICQ is a slang version of “I seek you”. ICQ was originally released in November 1996, and was freely available to anyone with a computer and Internet connection. By 2001, ICQ had over 100 million users registered out of the 361 million Internet users there were worldwide. As the Internet grew, other web chat clients became to arise, became more popular and eventually took over ICQ. These were messenger clients such as MSN messenger and AOL messenger (AOL who acquired title: Instant messaging text: per-minute fee on top of the monthly Q-Link access costs. Modern, Internet-wide, GUI-based messaging clients as they are known today, began to take off in the mid-1990s with PowWow, ICQ, and AOL Instant Messenger. Similar functionality was offered by CU-SeeMe in 1992; though primarily an audio/video chat link, users could also send textual messages to each other. AOL later acquired Mirabilis, the authors of ICQ; a few years later ICQ (then owned by AOL) was awarded two patents for instant messaging by the U.S. patent office. Meanwhile, other companies developed their own software; (Excite, MSN, Ubique, and Yahoo!), each with