America Online's ICQ subsidiary is hoping to juice up its popular instant messenger with games and other applications, as part of a major software overhaul to be officially unveiled next week.
The Internet pioneer expects to release the latest version of its instant messaging (IM) client, ICQ 4.0, on Tuesday, sources said. At that time, the company will also announce an initiative that for the first time will allow partners to obtain ICQ application programming interfaces (APIs), according to people familiar with the plan.
By publishing open APIs for developers, ICQ hopes to turn its instant messenger into an application platform, sources said--a risky path that was also attempted and later abandoned by AOL's Nullsoft division with its Winamp multimedia player.
ICQ in the past has drawn criticism for becoming too bloated, sparking the company to release a stripped-down version known as ICQ Lite.
ICQ 4.0 includes a new interface, greeting cards and new cell phone text-messaging capabilities.
With Tuesday's release of the update, ICQ partners will be able to use APIs to create almost any kind of program that would run within the instant messenger client. The APIs will support programming in HTML, DHTML and Flash.
"The idea is to use the message window as a 'social desktop'" similar to the way some people use Microsoft's Outlook e-mail application to handle other office tasks, such as meeting scheduling, one source said. "One of the cool things about this is that it's so flexible. Nobody knows what developers might eventually come up with."
Source: C|Net
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