ICQ7 intro­duces a way to man­age social mes­sag­ing across networks

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. Back in the day, 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 a sort of Face­book or Twit­ter a long time ago. It’s taken ICQ quite a long time to get back to its sta­tus as a social pio­neer, but now with its new client soft­ware, ICQ is get­ting back to what it was about all the way from the begin­ning: a place to inter­act with your friends every­where. “Every­body Every­where” is, after all, ICQ’s slo­gan, and being an ICQ vet­eran myself, I am very excited to announce the launch of the new ICQ 7.

ICQ 7 is soft­ware that brings together all your social inter­ac­tions from across the Web. Instead of hav­ing to open a few dif­fer­ent pages and appli­ca­tions to get my friends’ sta­tus updates on Face­book, to read tweets of my favorite peo­ple and to fol­low what’s hap­pen­ing on other sites as well such as Youtube, Flickr, Digg and Deli­cious, ICQ 7 allows me to use one per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool to inte­grate all my online social activ­i­ties. I am able to syn­di­cate my updates to all of my social net­works with a sin­gle click and get sta­tus updates and tweets from all my friends in my net­works in one sin­gle plat­form. (Dis­clo­sure: Blonde 2.0 is ICQ’s social media firm)

ICQ 7 enables real-time updates from con­tent shar­ing sites and top social net­works such as Face­book, Twit­ter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg and Deli­cious and will soon announce the inte­gra­tion of local social net­works. Alon­side the ICQ Con­tact List, users can find a sep­a­rate tab of real time feeds and updates from their friends from their var­i­ous social net­works. Users will no longer need to open up a new browser and log in to sep­a­rate net­works that they’re mem­bers of each time they want to com­ment on their friends’ updates. From now on, con­sider ICQ to be your social net­works’ one-stop shop. No longer will you need to search for con­tent on dif­fer­ent plat­forms — the con­tent finds you. ICQ 7’s inter­face is also improved with soft­ware that is fully com­pat­i­ble with all ver­sions of Microsoft Win­dows, includ­ing Win­dows 7.

A few cool fea­tures to note in ICQ 7

My Sta­tus: Sta­tus updates I make on ICQ can be auto­mat­i­cally posted in my other sup­ported net­works as well. I can also eas­ily share pic­tures and links.

Feeds from friends: Updates made by your friends on lead­ing social net­works and con­tent shar­ing sites appear in real time in the “Feeds from Friends” tab on the con­tact list. You can com­ment on these updates directly from your ICQ and the com­ment will appear also in the rel­e­vant social network/site. You can see updates from all your friends in your var­i­ous social net­works — not just from friends that have ICQ.

My Box: The “My Box” tab on the ICQ Con­tact List is the place where ICQ users get all noti­fi­ca­tions of their per­sonal online activ­ity – who com­mented on my sta­tus and in which site, who liked the pho­tos I uploaded, etc.

New User Pro­file: ICQ 7 presents a more enhanced user pro­file — both within the client and on the web­site. The user pro­file is the place where users can dis­play who they are by shar­ing pic­tures and per­sonal updates on their page. The new user pro­file is now offered in color schemes that are fully cus­tomiz­able to suit the user’s mood. Addi­tion­ally, the new user pro­file allows ICQ users to view their friends’ con­tact lists and add new peo­ple to their own con­tact list, thereby increas­ing their cir­cle of friends.

Picture-Sharing Tool: A new, quick and fun appli­ca­tion for shar­ing pic­tures with friends — see above.

Faster, lighter: ICQ 7 per­for­mance has been vastly improved with instal­la­tion time reduced by nearly 50% and requested space for instal­la­tion reduced approx­i­mately by 30%.

ICQ 7 offers a social mes­sag­ing client that enables quick and easy com­mu­ni­ca­tion friends from across net­works, abil­ity to view real-time updates from: Face­book, Twit­ter, YouTube, Flickr, Digg and Delicious.

Israel-based ICQ’s man­ag­ing direc­tor, Eliav Moshe, says: “ICQ 7 brings social mes­sag­ing into play, inte­grat­ing users’ online social world with their per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool. The new ver­sion answers users’ needs for a quick and easy com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool that also helps you be up to date with every­thing that’s going on in mul­ti­ple social net­works and con­tent shar­ing sites. With a loyal com­mu­nity of over 42 mil­lion users world­wide, we are work­ing on the upcom­ing inte­gra­tion of local social net­works into ICQ 7 as well.”

It is only fit­ting that the com­pany that was the pio­neer of the Web 2.0 era has now inte­grated this Web 2.0 world into one man­age­able space. Try it out for your­self and let me know what you think. In my opin­ion, it offers the best solu­tion we have today for one plat­form that inte­grates all our social inter­ac­tions into one con­ve­nient platform.

Become an ICQ fan on Face­book

Check out their Twit­ter

Addi­tional images

• ICQ noti­fi­ca­tions
• ICQ feeds

Ayelet Noff is founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0, a con­sul­tancy spe­cial­iz­ing in help­ing brands use social media tools such as social net­works, the blo­gos­phere and social soft­ware to cre­ate brand aware­ness, recruit employ­ees or achieve any other goal. See her busi­ness pro­file, con­tact Ayelet, fol­low her on Twit­ter or leave a com­ment below.

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