More AOL disintegration (and dismal ROI) – see the full post for the AOL press release
It was no secret that AOL was looking for a buyer for ICQ for quite a while now, and it found one in Russian investment company Digital Sky Technologies, the same one that already owns a portion of Facebook and Zynga.
ICQ is a bit of a fallen legend; Israeli-based company Mirabilis created it in 1996, setting the standards for desktop-based instant messaging, but it became quite bloated over the years, prompting many users to switch to lightweight alternatives such as Miranda, Digsby and Gtalk.
AOL acquired Mirabilis on June 8, 1998, for $407 million; now they sold it for less than half the amount: $187.5 million
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