INF about 12111, alternative clients and the future of ICQ

Very interested in the post developer QIP in his blog:

Overlooked
At the time when I was on vacation, something happened, namely, 06/18/2008 , “everyone” had a contact number 12111. I read how many people had opinions and versions about his appearance and also read the official version, but then none of them still explains a few things:

1. Why did this contact appear mostly only for those users who live in Russia?
2. Why did they write on the official website of ICQ that this contact was added to improve services? And there is not a single word about fighting spam? Although most think that it was added to combat spam?
3. Why did this contact go online just a few times and sent “all” to Russian users a message in Russian of the form “Download ICQ6 and receive free sms and voice calls ...”?
4. Why is this contact now quietly removed and no longer added?

But this is not the end. On July 1, 2008, ICQ forcibly transplants all its users to ICQ6, preventing it from remaining on ICQ5.1. At the same time, some alternative clients stop working, including QIP 2005. But even here there are strange things, why it didn’t affect the users of the official client of ICQ 2003b Pro (possibly other older ones), possibly due to the fact that it is completely old and need a
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All these actions can justify the following:
Rumor has it that Microsoft and Yahoo want to buy AOL (ICQ owned by AOL) from TimeWarner. If so, then perhaps ICQ company needs accurate statistics of users of the official client, and not only accurate, but also maximized. You can try to increase the number of ICQ6 users at the expense of alternative clients by blocking them. Now there are a lot of alternative clients and especially popular ones have been bitten off by the percentage of users at the official client. There is one more thing, according to my data, the users of alternative clients are the most in our country. This explains the appearance of contact 12111 and its messages in Russian. Moreover, the majority of users of alternative customers in our country account for QIP. Another alternative client that is not so popular in Russia, but who also stopped working on July 1, is Adium. But this is the only normal client for MAC OS platforms, which are very popular in the USA (Macs and the truth are quietly gaining popularity in our country). Those. If we assume that this was an attempt to block popular alternative clients, then ICQ did it for 1 day, if I don’t know the number of ICQ6 users, but I don’t see it exactly as expected.
Why?

Because, as it seems to me, this is not the last attempt. There is another rumor that 04.08.2008 ICQ will block all alternative clients. What will happen this time and who will suffer, I don’t know. But personally, I am tired of it, can not be so related to its users. ICQ has already given many times a reason for users to switch to other IM networks. And we must probably follow this, what is the alternative to ICQ? This Jabber, open, predictable, ad-free, supports chat rooms, no problems with message encodings. How to switch to jabber without any problems? To do this, there is QIP Infium and qip .ru accounts, we have our own jabber servers, which are linked to all jabber servers in the world, communicate as much as you want, no one will step up communication. I think that soon I will call on people to switch to open protocols, because I don’t want QIP users to remain for some time without communication, as happened on July 1.

I usually do not believe the rumors, but I begin to listen to these, especially after the appearance of contact 12111, which showed us the nearest plans of ICQ.

www.inf.ru/2008/07/23/upuschennoe-iz-vidu