ICQ is not really taking over AIM

According an article in Ynet news,

“ICQ Israel will soon be responsible for the software development of AOL instant messenger, or AIM, following a recent decision by the company.”

I have fielded as many questions about this article as I have about the looming layoffs at AOL. With all the other rumors going around AOL, this article came at a bad time and delivered an inaccurate message. The AIM and ICQ teams have been talking about much better collaboration for a while now. A bunch of us from Dulles, VA went to Israel in July to meet with the ICQ team to work out a plan for developing desktop clients together. We accomplished our goal by building a plan to reinstrument the ICQ client to use OpenAIM as the client infrastructure. ICQ already shares most back-end services with AIM. Next, AIM features will be added to ICQ so the client can effectively serve both products. We will build a future version of the AIM client on top of the teriffic ICQ client platform.

Development of OpenAIM, the host platform, Web IM, and some desktop client work will remain in Dulles.

The ICQ team in Tel Aviv is full of very talented and dedicated people. I first started working with the founders 1999 after AOL acquired ICQ. I have always enjoyed working with them and have developed a deep respect for the team in Tel Aviv. Over the past year, they have developed ICQ6 into a fantastic client platform with capabilities that will serve our customers and our business well.

ICQ TV Commercial

ICQ recently launced an IM client with Orange Israel. Orange produced a TV commercial for it! Check it out here.