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Culture and host
Not sure if this is the right place to put it but out of sheer curiosity...
I'd love to know the reasons for some of the below, if any locals care to chime in
Russian providers tend to almost always exclusively use ICQ for support, never AIM itself (even though they're essentially the same protocol), which I never really got.
Asian providers (China, SK mostly) seem to really like "BBS" basically making you post support requests in something like a forum instead of a ticketing system. I feel weird doing this.
Why do so many chinese like numbers? like [email protected] or something, etc for emails. Or always adding numbers to the end of their name? Almost all of the support emails I see are 163.com or some other number domain..
Japanese providers like setup fees and annual payment WAAAAAAAAAAY too much. Like, multiple years at once.
EU seems to really like setup fees and prepayment (3month+).
German seems to have a lot of automation in datacentres. Is this just some efficiency thing? Or newer buildings? Almost every german host I see is at least partially automated, while in the US I still have to put in a ticket for RDNS at most places, much less rescuesystem.
I'm just not understand these.
Somewhat unrelated but related: I was asked if I was muslim once while buying a dedicated server in India. WTF?
Comments
This is the only one I can really explain... 163.com is basically China's Yahoo. It's a popular web portal, email provider, etc. They even have an MMORPG that they operate.
EDIT: Upon further investigation, ICQ is popular in Russia because it's owned by a Russian company. I would imagine that's where they focus any advertising they do and whatnot.
One of my good friends, who is Japanese, likes numbers because they're more universal than his native language. Plus, domains names don't support unicode, which may have something to do with it.
Asian users like annual payment. Many of our support tickets and emails from Asian users are for requesting extended invoice periods. So far we haven't gotten a request for multiple years...
What?
Admin Address........ ICQ LLC
Admin Address........ 22000 AOL Way
Admin Address........ Dulles
Admin Address........ 20166
Admin Address........ VA
You mix up the reason and consequence. ICQ was bought by russian company because of its popularity in Russia.
Why ICQ became popular in Russia? I dunno.
A few years ago 95% of russian internet users had ICQ and it is still rather popular.
Have not noticed that
Almost never see US hosts with them unless strange setup or to reduce monthly fee.
Random EU provider searches - like Worldstream "All prices on this website are excluding 19% VAT and based on a payment per 6 months", Hetzner huge setup fee, Strato/Hosteurope/etc all default to "with yearly contract" pricing , then charge setup fee if don't, giga-international same, etc
Lots of Chinese people have qq.com and 163.com email addresses, I think they are two major ISPs. Just a guess.
For point # 2 maybe something like how Yahoo messenger was (not sure if it's now) the most popular in some Asian countries like Japan. While for point # 3, I guess it's because if you look at Chinese letters you will notice that they have got an exceptional ability to get along with very complicated names/letters, hence using 2645469544.com for Chinese could be similar to lowendbox.com.
Give this man a cookie, this is why you get the numerical addresses from qq.com and 163.com. They're essentially gmail-like accounts used primarily for communications with the Western world.
unicode as in ? greek alphabets in the address bar ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IDN-utopia-greek.jpg
Ever try to view east-asian fonts on a pre-vista windows box? Without the language packs installed on a windows mailserver (and honestly, who in the US/UK would bother with non-latin charsets unless they were an international business), the non-US ASCII addresses (such as 日本人@日人日本人.com) would fail. (check out http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5322.txt)
There is RFC5336, which handles international/UTF-8 just fine, but this is relatively new. So it's simpler for languages outside of the latin charset to simply acquire a service like qq or 163.com.
You've all left out 126.com, think of the children!
It's not that much ICQ russian related thing that AIM american related thing.
I mean who apart from americans, use American Online Instant Messenger (AIM) anyway? AIM is more or less unknown service outside of North America. From those older instant messenger protocols rest of the world use MSN and partially ICQ.
nevermind, but no delete button
Nobody has stated the obvious yet, so... ICQ has been around much long than AIM has been.
...where exactly did you get that bit of info? For years, I used AIM protocol in various clients to keep in touch with quite a few non-US folks.
... and what's your point beside that you personally use AIM with some non-us folks? Well, good for you - or what to say. I am pretty sure that in my life time I will sooner or later meet someone (or even more people) from europe which use AIM too.
I didn't get this info anywhere - it base only on my now almost 17 yrs old usage of various internet chat protocols for communication with rest of the world.
edit.
It looks like the popular belief that AOL Instant Messenger or AIM is leading IM client is simply a myth. AIM is popular in North America, and only in North America, engaging in three corner fight with MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger, with each garnering between 27 percent and 37 percent of IM users.
The MSN Messenger application has the strongest penetration worldwide, with 61 percent of worldwide IM users utilizing the application in February. MSN Messenger is also dominant in Latin America, reaching more than 90 percent of IM users, and in Europe and Asia Pacific, reaching more than 70 percent of IM users in each region. North America is the most competitive IM market, with MSN Messenger, AOL/Aim and Yahoo! Messenger each garnering between 27 percent and 37 percent of IM users in February.
AIM is only popular in America I think. I can't think of more than a single person that uses AIM, and I've never used anything else than MSN. - AirPacific747
I asked a similar question about a year ago, and it seems that MSN is really popular in Europe, since it comes with Windows, and AOL was first a subscription service. - AeroWesty
All of my friends and family in Thailand have MSN, they hadn't heard of AIM, which was my main reason for getting MSN - Frontiercpt
(quotes from airliners.net forum)
That's very good point for better understanding. Thank you.
Over a hundred of us from an RU forum back in 2000 or so used the AIM protocol to keep in touch. I'd say that counts as more than 'some'.
My point being that AIM being 'unknown' outside the US was flat out false. No need to be touchy over someone's personal experiences not completely coinciding with your own.
And yet you quote questionable sources anyways?
Yeah, let's just leave the epeen out of this. After all, anyone can google technology dates and tell a lie, so why bother?
I miss the original Miribilis versions. Back when common UINs were 6 digits or less :P
Look champ, I know how painfully you're looking always for chance to bring crap and trolling into another LET thread but no...
AIM is not popular and widely used outside of North America no matter what you say and is it even important what you say? You don't even remotely contribute to anything at LET with your standard "I can beat you with my arguments even if they are false" pose. I don't like you, your immature flaming/troll nature, you don't like me.. fine, but come on... do you really need to feed your ego with your false and not even remotely meaningful statements all over the LET on daily basis?
Don't bother to answer - I expressed my opinion regarding @justinb question and hopefully contributed to better understanding and that's it. Your personal issues don't interrest me and I will do my best not to respond to your another "my epennis is bigger than yours" reply which will soon follow without doubts.
But of course, it would be rude to simply walk out of a conversation.
Perhaps you should take a chance to actually read what I said instead of attempting to insult me out of spite. Here, I'll even point out your incorrect paraphrasing:
Never said it was popular, or that it could've been called widely used. I contested your argument that AIM was close to unheard-of. I even quoted you saying exactly this (http://i54.tinypic.com/8whc1u.png), before providing my example that countered the claim, and requesting where you had obtained the information.
Noted, though completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. Unless this is the reason for unhelpful reply? If it helps you feel any better, I don't have a particular opinion of you one way or another.. our sparse exchanges here are hardly enough of a basis for me to judge you on.
If childish attacks are the best contribution you have to make, then feel free to simply ignore any of my posts. Just do me the courtesy of letting me know, and I'll endeavor to refrain from quoting or replying to you directly so that it doesn't appear as though you were simply disregarding another user's posts. Other than that, the best I can tell you is learn to read for comprehension before you make baseless assumptions.
@Aldryic why you're so eager to destroy every thread in your squaring with everyone who told you that you're wrong somewhere ages ago?
I don't know anyone in Germany that uses AIM and only few to still use ICQ.
Cool story bro :P
I see a ton of people in the 'western world' using AIM. Mostly UK, US, Canada, etc. Not so much further to the right. It's definitely not US only
That being said, AIM and ICQ both run OSCAR and I'm pretty sure you can add an ICQ UIN to your AIM buddylist and talk to them directly..
With quoting me I hope that you're awared that Canada is part of North America. I am not sure if really ton of people from UK use it but yes.. that's possible exception. We have plenty UK members at LET and they can hopefully tell us more (it also interest me).
Anyway... I hope that it's more clear to you now why russian providers use ICQ for support but not AIM.
As an Australian pretty much no body I knew used AIM, it seemed to have the largest user base in the US. MSN seems to be the most used network after facebook chat (which took the crown in ~2009).
as another thing on this..
germans seem to really like their debian/confixx/plesk, in the US it's much more centos-centered (except for places like linode)
europeans in general seem to allow most legal things like irc and in the US no one wants to touch that
strange that