It’s official: AOL and Digital Sky Technologies Limited (DST), one of the largest Internet companies in the world announced just now that they have reached an agreement for DST to acquire ICQ. There have been rumors spreading for a while now regarding the acquisition of ICQ by various sources, however, now it’s official.  Tim Armstrong CEO and Chairman of AOL said: ““As AOL continues its turnaround effort, we’re fortunate to find a great home for ICQ [...]

If we look back in history , we will find that much before Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, there was ICQ. For anyone who doesn’t know, ICQ was created in 1996 and is now wholly owned by AOL. ICQ was THE pioneer of social media and real time updates. It introduced us to instant messaging and a revolutionary new way to communicate with people instantly in real time. ICQ could have been Facebook or Twitter a long time [...]

It can be argued that AOL is the granddaddy of the social Web. They were the first to have a buddies list, the first to really get instant messaging, groups, email as a social graph and they were the first to integrate all of these in one service. Lately they seem to be making a push back to their social roots with an entire division called People Networks built around their social properties (Bebo, AIM, [...]