Right after the announcement that a Malaysian company, MOL Global, is acquiring Friendster, ICQ is up for sale to the highest bidder and one of the interested parties is Google.

Who remembers ICQ? I remember that even when ICQ, which was acquired by AOL many years ago, was big, I was not using it as often as some other people. True, I did download and install it, like many other free programmes on my computer, and I also logged in to my ICQ every my computer started up and connected to the internet but I only had a few contacts who used ICQ and you know, most of them either moved on to Yahoo! Messenger and then subsequently to MSN or I no longer keep in touch with them anymore.

Apparently, even ICQ is not used as much in the United States anymore but it is still big in Russia. Eh? LOL Russians didn’t move on? I guess it’s because of language support or something.

The reason that Google is interested to acquire it is because they need a foothold to penetrate into the Russian market and ICQ seems like an appropriate tool for them right now.

Hot on the heels of a redesign, Friendster announced that they are to be acquired by a Malaysian company, MOL Global. Although the price was not disclosed, industry sources estimates it to be at least US$100 million. MOL Global, whose main shareholder is Berjaya Corp., a very dynamic Malaysian company with business concerns around the world, already has an alliance with Friendster as its micropayments provider.

You know, it’s kind of funny that although Friendster, valued at US$210 million back in July, 2009, was one of the earliest social networking portal, many people who used Friendster have subsequently moved on to other “cooler” social network sites like MySpace, and subsequently Facebook but Frienster users here in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines are still stuck to the Friendster era. Friendster was launched sometime in 2002 or 2003 and that in internet speak was eons ago!

Personally, I have already moved on to Facebook and hardly log into my other social network accounts with Friendster, MySpace, Hi5 and some other social websites that I don’t even remember the name to and may have lost my password too but with a redesign and the inclusion of social games that I spend a lot of time playing on Facebook, like Mafia Wars and Restaurant City, I may just check Friendster out again.

Soon after seeing how Yahoo! has integrated Facebook on their website, Google announced that they are marrying Twitter. Google already has a social networking service called Google Friend Connect but with 8+ million monthly users, Google is not happy with that. With this collaboration, Google users would be able to log in to their accounts with their Twitter IDs and vice versa.

I don’t know about you but I am really not that comfortable with the concept of Open ID. Sure I like the fact that there are less usernames and passwords to remember but wouldn’t this make it easier for hackers to hack? Were we not told time and again to regularly change the passwords of our accounts to various websites, especially email and financial websites?

Anyway, I don’t know how well Google and twitter users will receive this service. To me, Twitter is a really simple and no-frills microblogging service. I don’t see why we should complicate it.

If there was yet another gripe that I have with Gmail, and I do have a number of gripes (teehee), then it was the inability to enclose attachments in emails that I intended to send while offline. That’s why I never used that feature. You know, if you wanted to send an email while offline and you wanted to attach a file but you were unable to, then that’s not the email that you wanted to send, isn’t it?

The good news is that this shortcoming has been looked into and addressed but of course, if you haven’t already done so, you will have to enable Offline Gmail first then set up Gmail in offline mode with Google Gears and then you can send your email with Gmail while offline and attach files in your emails.

However, do bear in mind that if you are offline, you would not be able to send inline images in your email. You’d need to be connected to the internet for that.