ICQ

On return to his home soil in Australia, McLean's film was nominated for Best Sound Design (short film) for the prestigious AFI (Australian Film Institute) awards in 2002. Joulutonttu is Finnish for Christmas elf. The short film took out the "Best Director" award in October 2001 at the International and Independent Film and Video festival in New York. Saunatonttu lives in the sauna and protects it, but also makes sure that people will not behave improperly in it. The relationship runs the gauntlet of intrigue through to the sinister. He takes care of the house, ut it is also important to treat him with respect. The film was described by its writer as a mystery/drama, and it concerns a man who while surfing the ICQ network comes across a woman whose acquaintance he could well have done without. Kotihaltia (home elf, home gnome) is the word for a tonttu that lives in every home.

A short film about ICQ was written in 2001 called ICQ and was written by Greg McLean, who later wrote Wolf Creek. They mean a piece of land, on which a house is built, and later protected by a local spirit, a tonttu. Users on ICQ are able to communicate with AIM users; however, such capability is in beta stages. Both tonttu and tomte are related to words tontti (Finnish) and tomt (Swedish). AOL has recently begun making its ICQ software more AIM-like by adding AIM Smilies, as well as introducing cross AIM/ICQ communication. When written as haltia, the term usually refers to the elves in Tolkien's mythology or other such fantasy works. 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:. The word is derived from Gothic *haltijar, and referred to the original settler of a homestead.

Both programs are no longer available to download. Tonttu or haltija is a Finnish version of the Swedish Tomte. Spinoffs of ICQ included a corporate version for the workplace (named ICQ Groupware), and ICQ Surf, which displayed a list of other ICQ users who also happened to be surfing on the same website as you were. However, ever since AOL's involvement, development of ICQ Pro 2003 had effectively been left abandoned, to the disappointment of veteran users of ICQ. ICQ Pro came about since the emergence of ICQ Lite to differentiate between the two available clients.

Users have by and large migrated to the competition: MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, and Skype. Although innovative at the start, the general trend of ICQ updates has been towards bloatware. 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. ICQ 5, released on Monday, February 7, 2005, was an upgrade on ICQ Lite - a divergence from the main ICQ program that has an big addition - Xtraz, which now offers games and features appealing to the younger users of the internet.

In June 2004 ICQ celebrated its 300 millionth download from download.com where it remained the most popular program for 7 consecutive years. On December 19, 2002, AOL Time Warner announced that ICQ had been issued a United States patent for instant messaging. America Online (AOL) acquired Mirabilis on June 8, 1998 for $287 million in cash. After AOL bought it, it was managed by Ariel Yarnitsky and Avi Shechter.

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: Yair Goldfinger, Arik Vardi, Sefi Vigiser and Amnon Amir. New users are now given a UIN of well over 300,000,000, and low numbers (six digits or fewer) have been auctioned on eBay by users who signed up in ICQ's early days. ICQ users are identified by numbers called UIN, distributed in sequential order (though it is rumored there are gaps in the sequence). Instead, they have targeted younger users with an avalanche of colors, avatars, and animations.

Even though such features have been available since around 2000, many of the main competitors such as AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger have failed to implement such power-user oriented features even to this day. Other features included a searchable user directory and POP3 email support. ICQ allows the sending of text messages with offline support, URLs, multi-user character-by-character chats, resumable file transfers, SMSes, greeting cards and more. .

The name ICQ is a play on the phrase "I seek you". patent office. ICQ was awarded two major patents by the U.S. The program was first released in November 1996, and was the first all-internet instant messaging program.

ICQ is an instant messaging computer program, created by Mirabilis, an Israeli start-up company based in Tel-Aviv. &RQ (ICQ) - Support ICQ only , available in Russian and English only. YSM - text-based. Yeemp - supports ICQ, AIM, and Yeemp.

Trillian - supports ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, IRC, Jabber and others. stICQ - supports ICQ, for Symbian OS. Proteus - supports ICQ, Yahoo!, Yahoo Japan!, AIM, MSN, Jabber and iChat Rendezvous, for Mac OS X. For MS Windows only.

Miranda IM - plugin based, supports ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, BNet, and others. mICQ - text-based. Licq. Kopete.

Jimm (J2ME client, previously "Mobicq"). Jabber (Official site) / (*More competing Jabber-powered clients). GnomeICU (previously GtkICQ). Gaim - supports ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu and SILC.

Fire - supports ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, IRC, and Jabber, for Mac OS X. Easy Message (http://www.easymessage.net/) - Small instant messenger (250kb), supports MSN, AOL, ICQ, and Yahoo. centericq - supports ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, IRC and Jabber, text-based. Ayttm - supports ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, IRC, and Jabber.

Adium - supports ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN and Jabber, for Mac OS X.