Title: ICQ
Content:  ICQ New is a cross-platform instant messaging (IM) and VoIP client. The name ICQ derives from the English phrase "I Seek You". Originally developed by the Israeli company Mirabilis in 1996, the client was bought by AOL in 1998, and then by Mail.Ru Group in 2010. The ICQ client application and service were initially released in November 1996, freely available to download. ICQ was among the first stand-alone instant messenger (IM) — while real-time chat was not in itself new (Internet Relay Chat (IRC) being the most common platform at the time), the concept of a fully centralized service with individual user accounts focused on one-on-one conversations set the blueprint for later instant messaging services like AIM, and its influence is seen 
Title: ICQ
Content:  U.S. and many other countries over the 2000s, it remained the most popular instant messaging network in Russian-speaking countries, and an important part of online culture. Popular UINs demanded over 11,000₽ in 2010. In September of that year, Digital Sky Technologies changed its name to Mail.Ru Group. Since the acquisition, Mail.ru has invested in turning ICQ from a desktop client to a mobile messaging system. As of 2013, around half of ICQ's users were using its mobile apps, and in 2014, the number of users began growing for the first time since the purchase. In March 2016 the source code of the client was released under the Apache license on github.com.
Title: ICQ
Content:  modern social media applications. ICQ became the first widely adopted IM platform. At its peak around 2001, ICQ had more than 100 million accounts registered. At the time of the Mail.Ru acquisition in 2010, there were around 42 million daily users. Since 2013, ICQ has 11 million monthly users. In 2020, the Mail.Ru Group, which owns ICQ, decided to launch its new ICQ New software, based on its messenger. The updated messenger was presented to the general public on April 6, 2020. During the second week of January 2021, ICQ saw a renewed increase in popularity in Hong Kong, spurred on by the controversy over WhatsApp's privacy policy update. The number of downloads for the application increased 35-fold in the region.
Title: ICQ
Content:  The founding company of ICQ, Mirabilis, was established in June 1996 by five Israeli developers: Yair Goldfinger, Sefi Vigiser, Amnon Amir, Arik Vardi, and Arik's father Yossi Vardi. They recognized that many people were accessing the internet through non-UNIX operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows, and those users were unfamiliar with established chat technologies, e.g. IRC. ICQ was one of the first text-based messengers to reach a wide range of users. The technology Mirabilis developed for ICQ was distributed free of charge. The technology's success encouraged AOL to acquire Mirabilis on June 8, 1998, for $287 million up front and $120 million in additional payments over three years based on performance levels. 
Title: Instant messaging
Content:  Later in the 1990s, ICQ was among the first closed and commercialized instant messengers, and several rival services appeared afterwards as it became a popular use of the Internet. Beginning with its first introduction in 2005, BlackBerry Messenger, which initially had been available only on BlackBerry smartphones, soon became one of the most popular mobile instant messaging apps worldwide. BBM was for instance the most used mobile messaging app in the United Kingdom and Indonesia. Instant messaging remains very popular today; IM apps are the most widely used smartphone apps: in 2018 there were over 1.3 billion monthly users of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and 980 million monthly active users of WeChat.
Title: Instant messaging
Content:  dominance in the instant messaging market. A few years later ICQ (then owned by AOL) was awarded two patents for instant messaging by the U.S. patent office. Meanwhile, other companies developed their own software; (Excite, MSN, Ubique, and Yahoo!), each with its own proprietary protocol and client; users therefore had to run multiple client applications if they wished to use more than one of these networks. In 1998, IBM released IBM Lotus Sametime, a product based on technology acquired when IBM bought Haifa-based Ubique and Lexington-based Databeam. In 2000, an open-source application and open standards-based protocol called Jabber was launched. The protocol was standardized 
Title: ICQ
Content:  Gadu-Gadu, BNet and others, for Windows ; Naim: ncurses-based ; Pidgin (formerly Gaim): supports ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, Gtalk, MSN, IRC, XMPP, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, Meanwhile, (IBM Lotus Sametime) and others ; QIP: supports ICQ, AIM, XMPP and XIMSS ; stICQ: supports ICQ, for Symbian OS ; Trillian: supports ICQ, IRC, Google Talk, XMPP and others AOL Instant Messenger (discontinued in 2017) ; Messages/iChat: uses ICQ's UIN as an AIM screenname, for macOS AOL's OSCAR network protocol used by ICQ is proprietary and using a third party client is a violation of ICQ Terms of Service. Nevertheless, a number of third-party clients have been created by using reverse-engineering and protocol descriptions. These clients include:  AOL supported clients include:
Title: WebChat Broadcasting System
Content:  Web-based chatting in general began to lose popularity with the rise of several instant messaging desktop applications in the late 1990s. ICQ was first released in November 1996. AOL Instant Messenger was released in May 1997. Yahoo! Pager, later renamed Yahoo! Messenger, launched on 9 March 1998. AOL acquired ICQ's parent company Mirabilis on 8 June 1998. MSN Messenger from Microsoft, later renamed Windows Live Messenger, debuted on 22 July 1999.
Title: ICQ
Content:  with Facebook and other websites. It also allows custom personal status similar to Windows Live Messenger (MSN Messenger). ICQ 7.0 does not support traditional Chinese on standard installation or with the addition of an official language pack. This has made its adoption difficult with the established user base from Hong Kong and Taiwan where traditional Chinese is the official language. ; ICQ 8, released on February 5, 2012 - "Meet the new generation of ICQ, Enjoy free video calls, messages and SMS, social networks support and more." ; ICQ 10.0, released January 18, 2016. Newest update is 10.0 Build 12393, released on November 8, 2018. 
Title: ICQ
Content:  5.1 use version 9 of the protocol. ICQ 2002 and 2003a used version 8 of the ICQ protocol. Earlier versions (ICQ 2001b and all ICQ clients before it) used ICQ protocol version 7. ; ICQ 4 and later ICQ 5 (released on Monday, February 7, 2005), were upgrades on ICQ Lite. One addition was Xtraz, which offers games and features intended to appeal to younger users of the Internet. 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 relatively slow computers. ; ICQ 5 introduced skins support. There 

Question: what was icq as related to instant messaging?
Answer: an instant messaging client.