ICQ is an instant messaging protocol and a client. The service is very popular among Russian-speaking users of the Internet, especially in Russia and Ukraine (consequently, as recently as 2010, AOL sold ICQ to a Russian Internet media company). ICQ also connects you to your buddies on AIM and Facebook accounts.
ICQ has been around for over a decade. It has over 100 million users, most of whom reside in Russia and Russian-speaking countries. The service uses the OSCAR protocol, which was pushed by America Online while it owned ICQ. The protocol allows you to communicate with other ICQ users, as well as AIM users, and recently Facebook users.
An ICQ user ought to have a UIN, which is a personal number that identifies the user's record on the server. You can also sign in the service using the email address you provided during the registration. To run the application, you will need a browser that supports Adobe's Air. Most modern browsers support this technology. It is a little but misleading to call it ICQ for Mac as this version can run on any computer that can run Adobe's Air environment. On the other hand, however theoretically impossible, the feature set of the program may vary between Windows or Linux distributions of the program. Regardless, I was able to successfully run ICQ for Mac on Linux.
What are the perks of using this client? Well first of all it is authorized by the owner. Second, it looks nice. I like its interface. For over 10 years ICQ retained its green color theme but changed interface considerably; still, it managed to keep looking very modern and cute. more
Java-based chat client. If you need to communicate with contacts on several public IM channels simultaneously and don't want to clutter your desktop..
Comments (3)
On the other hand, if you install this program onto your computer, there'll be nothing to be sorry about, cause it works just the way you'd like an IM client work.
Still, the amount of spambots in it is really astonishing, so watch out for ones!