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Yahoo Shutting Out Third-Party IM Clients?
prostoalex writes "Following the lead of America Online's previous attempts and MSN's actions, Yahoo is planning an update that may cut out third-party providers like Trillian or Gaim. If you're a current Trillian user with a valid Yahoo ID, you probably noticed the new welcome message: 'Yahoo! is upgrading to its newest version of Yahoo! Messenger on September 24, 2003. The upgrade is part of an ongoing process to continually enhance the overall quality of the Yahoo! Messenger service for our millions of users'." Update: 09/18 01:17 GMT by S : Trillian has just released a patch that updates the IM software "...to the newest Yahoo! and MSN protocols, to remove the recent upgrade messages."
Jabber and email. If my contacts won't change to Jabber, then we'll just use email as we have been for years.
I think that these companies should support third party applications or, atleast, ports to differnt operating systems. Anything that expands your marketshare, right?
chdir("c:\\con\\con");
Now if they only had good interoperable clients...
SBC stands for Stupid Bell Company
AT&T stands for All Telephones Tapped
Trillian Pro 1.0d was just released that fixes the MSN and Yahoo! issues. Trillian Pro 2.0 (final) has no problems.
;)
Wow, I love it when people don't use the latest versions
Maybe it's time to start an open-source alternative to AIM, MSN Messenger, etc...
I'm not programmer, but maybe it could include elements of P2P to make it efficient, and attractive.
Make the client light, fast, and free.
World's tallest building rises in the desert
They do say ""Third-party clients will likely be affected, but we're trying to communicate with other providers around the common goal of opening up the IM community," she said."
Which is probably PR-speak for "we want to keep our precioussss protocols closed".
What should we do now, hate Yahoo! because they take less time than MS ? At least MS makes it blantantly obvious when they go use monopolistic practices.
(:
where is the economic incentive to provide an IM service that everybody in the world can use? Servers do cost money... any ideas on how one could fund this?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Because not being able to chat with people you could chat with previously is a great sign of "continual enhancement"
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Trillian forums are strangely unavailable for comment as well.....
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
0.74 E for the free client, Trillian Pro has an update too.
Right here.
See, not so bad right? I'm sure the Gaim people will have it fixed shortly too.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
....as long as those users agree with our choice of OS and platform. I run OS X and the standard Yahoo! client is lame. It's a cheap port of the windows client. Third party programmers have filled the gap; it's a shame to see Yahoo! cut these clients off in order to preserve the illusion of control.
when IM first became popular and ICQ was the only major one, i used it and there were never any problems, now everyone i know uses something different it just gets to be a big hastle...
i think ill stick to email and IRC
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
But here's wishing that the warning message is just a bunch of smoke to get people to fall in line with the official client.
Ñ'
I'm not surprised but I don't think they actually want to shut other clients out. I think that they can only offer compatibility with older clients up to a certain point before starting to sacrifice improvements, so sooner or later you will need to make drastic changes. Continous improvement of outdated protocols can lead to security and stability problems so I welcome these news.
Decameron
diegoT
Thank you. Drive through.
Yahoo was all about inter-operability a couple of years ago, when they were trying to convince AOL to do it, but now I guess they won't accept their own arguments.
I think its time for a open source mail client initiative. I know its going to cost money. But i bet people, including me, would pay to keep it rolling. I think in the near future most of the IM services would be made paid so why not pay to a open source organization.
That "to continually enhance the overall quality" almost always translates to "to make it so that you can't save money by switching to another brand" or "to screw you over by offering less service for the same price"?
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
All this protection and hoohah over an IM client. I could come close to understanding it over a secure, enterprise-level videoconferencing version of it, but dang. We're just a bunch of internet users chatting.. get a life, guys.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
As long as the process of getting into the proprietary network is not outrightly illegal, it won't take long for the Gaim and Trillian to come out with a patch. It's happened before.
Free Ipod here
This is often the case with reverse enginered
"standards". It is often better creating a real
standard and let the other implement it. Only
using the reverse enginered thing as a last option.
How long has people tried to open Office documents?
Why should this be different?
omfg i know
like fuck
now i cant talk to the zero people in this world that actually USE yahoo. damn. i feel so restricted now.
Wonderful, another few years of communication incompatibilities until one winner emerges. The problem with computers is that we need monopolies. Universal standards would work in a perfect world, but you would need an authoritative government implementing them. Corporate monopolies are not an ideal solution, but they are slightly better. My opinions on Microsoft have changed a great deal for the better over the past few years. I used to be as gung ho against the big bad giant corporation as anyone. But there is nothing that is going to replace the behemoth.
What do they have to gain from this? You can already download their clients for free- its not as if they're losing anything.
Esoteric reference.
Oh come on now, the slashdot summary of this article is written like the submitter didn't RTFA.
It says right in the article that they are trying to work with 3rd party providers to restore compatibility. The actual switch is a week off and I bet they'll be compatible by then. Note that this is nothing like the AOL shut out which has no purpose other than to shut out non-AOL clients
It's been around for some time and is definately the leader in open source instant messaging.
http://www.jabber.org/
Since when are Instant Messaging Service Providers obligated to keep backwards compatibility?
I think this is a good move by Yahoo! with no evil intentions whatsoever. They are simply upgrading their protocol, and it's not like gAIM or Trillian cannot update to such new protocol too.
This is not like Microsoft's attempt which is trying to extort money through licensing. Money, that most open source clients, don't have.
The best cure for insomnia is realizing that it is already time to get up. EsteEncanto.com - Blog on technology, urban
Couldn't they use multiple IMs as a competitive advantage?
Nostradamus predicts that the following will comprise approx. 1/3 of the comments posted on this topic:
;-)
SLASHDOTTER #1:
I don't use an Instant Messageing client you ignorant clod. In Soviet Russia I telenet to port 80 on a beowolf cluster of Open BSD(which happens to be dying) servers.
SLASHDOTTER #2:
I for one welcome our new Yahooligan overlords.
Oh Ya, and Nostradamus also predicts turmoil in the middle east.
Although I hate to see the third party applications being blocked, I can see the view that Yahoo! and the others are taking. This is their service, meant to be used with their clients, in order to gain revenue through advertisements and whatnot. When those clients aren't being used, and the advertisements aren't rolling in the cash, they cut off the moochers.
I actually don't like Trillian and gAIM, mainly because of the lack of features for MSN that came out in Messenger 6. There's other reasons, I suppose. I might just give Trillian Pro 2.0 a try though.
My two cents.
Insert witty Slashdot sig here.
Its only a matter of time before yahoo does the same. people choose thier IM client based on personal preference. Id rather not have 3 IM clients loaded at the same time and cant expect people to switch over from thier preferred IM protocol for me. If they have switched in the past 5 years or more for me, I cannot expect that theyll do so now.
Theyll make some changes in thier protocol to attempt to prevent 3rd party clients from connecting. itll be a few hours to a few days before there is a patch so that the 3rd party clients can again connect. At some point.. its just a waste of money.. for very little percieved return.. (advertising bullshit) that they get from the oem clients.
All Hail Trillian.
. . . but I will change IM depending on which ones are supported on my OS.
I'm part of a couple of Yahoo fantasy leagues. I use Yahoo IM to talk to my fellow owners. Now, I don't use any of the paid-for features of Yahoo, but I know my league-mates do. Do Yahoo think that making it harder for people to talk on Yahoo will
a) Increase the density of users willing to spend money on yahoo, or
b) Decrease the density of users willing to spend money on yahoo?
The usefulness of a centralised IM system is the square of the users, IIRC. Getting rid of those who don't have clients that work affects the network more than just the loss of those people.
I've been seeing and ignoring that same message on login on the latest Gaim for about two weeks or so...
Well, if you remember, Microsoft is gearing up to offer MSN Licenses, which at least offers 3rd party clients like Trillian a solution to their predicament.
My guess is that such 3rd party clients would recoup the license costs by either selling their user database to advertising companies, or throwing some ads into the client itself. If you want to get RID of the ads, you can buy the professional version (which would also cover the cost of the client license).
It's just another example that web services aren't really free; if a company really can't make money off of them, they will be replaced with a model that generates revenue (directly or indirectly). Yahoo seems to just be applying the rule here.
The latest Unix client for Yahoo! (1.0.4) was released just recently. From the Freshmeat notes:
The last release of Yahoo! Messenger based on the GTK1.2 codebase, this is mainly a bugfix release with a lot of stability, rendering, and speed fixes. It adds some enhancements and features such as an Addressbook tab, tab-aware URLs, active identities, and many archiving enhancements. More details and information are available via the publicly-accessible Yahoo! group, which provides a mechanism to interact with the Unix client developers.
The group referenced is here.
All weakness is within you, As is all courage.
"...part of an ongoing process to continually enhance the overall quality of the Yahoo!"
At least the move wasn't done under the guise of SECURITY like MS. You know, I almost single handedly took down MS's whole network by using GAIM. I really shouldn't have used the "buddy pounce" feature so much. ;-)
GI can see the big players like microsoft and aol trying this, but why yahoo. Last I heard they were way behind aim/icq and msn in usage. Right now my gaim has 41 icq users, 27 aim users, 6 jabber users, 5 msn users, and 1 yahoo user. The only thing yahoo stands to accomplish with this is to lose people like me as users, and possible people who want to talk to me.
Shouldn't yahoo be doing things to try and increase the nubmer of users on their system. Or even trying to shift instant messages to an open system to nullify the advantage aol and microsoft have over them.
If I were them I would be tring to get together with other smaller instant messaging services like gadu-gadu, and shift to jabber. Leverage the other yahoo services (and the @yahoo.com on their jabber address) as a reason to use the yahoo client. There service would be much more attractive since you get much more users to talk to. The same benifits apply to the other small guys who would join them.
Competing like this with webmail has worked well for them, why not try the same thing with instant messages.
they don't care about making anyone's life better, there goal is and ALWAYS was profit. Granted Yahoo! lost sight of that for a while , much like many companies in the SNAZZY BUZZ-WORD filled era of the DOT.BOMBS
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
ahem if u look at w3c rfs you will realize that most IM protocols are not closed but open and in public domain..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Rhymbox looks like the best of the Win32 clients that support the main chat protocols [MSN, Yahoo!, AIM and ICQ] and is also Jabber-compatible to make the imminent migration to an open protocol painless.
:-D
I would try it out except I'm running Knoppix right now and loving it
What gives trillian the right to steal profits from AOL and Yahoo? Trillian isnt freeware, so I can see why AOL and Yahoo would want to block Trillian.
The problem is blocking Trillian also blocks everything else, so why not put the blame where it belongs, on Trillian.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
There is an alternative in the offical yahoo messanger UNIX site
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
humans tend to have a very high tolerance for crappy things that are free, but a very low tolerance for crappy things they have to pay for.
-knowles
I agree with what you say, but Trillian is a company, they actually profit off other peoples networks and so I dont agree with Trillian.
I'd like to see Trillian sued or driven out of business myself. Look, if Trillian were open source freeware who would care? I dont think MSN and Yahoo would be doing this if it were just GAIM or even Jabber, the reason this happens with Trillian is because Trillian is a company, its that simple.
I would do the same thing if some other company were getting rich off my network. Ad revenue is one thing, and only AOL/Yahoo can be blamed for losing out on the Linux ad revenue etc, but when it comes to Trillian theres no reason for Trillian to exist.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
shuts out third party clients, people may think they're really sick and won't patronize them.
If two, two providers do it, in harmony, people may think they're faggots and won't patronize either of them.
And it three providers do it, three, can you imagine? Three providers shutting out third party clients. People might think it's an orginization.
And if all, all the IM providers do it, people might think it's a movement.
And that's just what it is people. The third party IM client anti-trust masacree movement.
Sing it the next time it comes around on the guitar.
With feeling.
KFG
What lockouts do, however, is annoy the rest of the user base. Some people won't want to upgrade. Some people don't want to use Yahoo!'s software or can't. Most people don't want to be warned about impending protocol changes every time they login. Almost everyone wants to be able to talk to their friends, regardless of their friends' software choices. These lockouts hurt the people using the official client just as much as everyone else. The only way Yahoo!'s going to stay a step ahead of hackers is to kill their service: repeated protocol changes will do it.
What needs to happen is cooperation. IM providers can make life easier on developers by offering specs. These benefits trickle down to users, since they always have the latest and greatest. Developers can return the favor to the IM providers by agreeing to introduce branding. The IM provider benefits overall by not threatening its userbase with lockouts, in addition to the publicity (and credibility) boost among geeks and others. "Don't like our software? Yahoo! supports the Open Source and Free Software movements by providing protocol documentation for our popular services. Read more here!" Imagine that!
One has to wonder if AIM would be faring better had AOL committed to this strategy, rather than going only a quarter of the way.
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
If there is anything at all that qualifies as a right, it's the ability to communicate with others freely. That is why removal of the freedom to communicate is quite possibly the harshest aspect of imprisonment. And that is why most of the free world regards regimes with repressive communication policies as being anti-freedom.
When a company provides a means of communication as part of their product, disallowing their customers from using that medium to communicate with non-customers is vastly worse than a mere business decision, if the tool is at all popular then it hits at the heart of people's daily lives.
It seems that politicians are too busy underpinning big business these days to notice unimportant issues like their citizens losing part of their ability to communicate freely. Well, I guess it's in the hands of the voters.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
It seems like Yahoo and AOL and MSN offer out a free service for ad revenue either in their IMs or at the download page et al, and also try to use IM as a hook into their other services (which are hooks to pay services.) So then Trillian comes along, bypasses all that, uses _their_ networks, and then has the gall to try and profit off of a Pro version? Fat chance!
Fnord.
Miranda is open source freeware too!
http://www.miranda-im.org/
Yahoo! is so full of themselves...I hope AIM never tries this crap again; I'd die if I had to go back to the regular AIM from my belived GAIM.
hi
You make it sound like those servers are being used for non-customers to communicate with non-customers. That's not so, they are barring customers from communicating with people outside.
This is 100% identical to an ISP disallowing external mail from reaching their mail servers. It makes zero sense.
They say they're doing this to protect their subcribers from SPAM?!?!? How obscene is THAT?
No, they're trying to keep us Trillian (and other similar third-party client) users from using their bug-ridden "service" without paying for it by watching their authorized SPAM.
Mnem
"Alien Anal Probes?!? Where do I sign up?"
What is it that IM clients do that IRC can't? In other words, why do people bother with proprietary instant messaging systems when IRC (appears to) do the same things, plus a whole lot more?
Is it the graphical smileys? What?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I'm just going to make a really quick gripe about the following. I have an AIM account that I actively use, and Yahoo! and ICQ accounts that I not-so actively use.
The official AIM client for OS X is trash. Pure and simple.
There are three big third-party alternatives: Fire, iChat, and Adium. Of these, two are OSS and Fire is multi-protocol. However, all are significantly lacking in their capabilities. For instance, iChat does not support sending profiles or animated buddy icons, nor does it support tabbed IM windows. Fire and Adium support this, but Adium only has alpha OSCAR support and Fire is somewhat unstable. There are clients that I'm glazing over completely, such as Proteus and probably at least one other, but suffice to say, the state of IM is pretty damn shitty.
I'm going to make a desperate plea for someone to make a native Aqua port of GAIM. GAIM is the greatest IM client ever. I've used the Windows port, and other than slow window resizing, it's great. I would do this myself, but my programming experience is very slim.
Barring an actual port, does anybody have compilation instructions for OS X so I can at least run it under X11?
Trillian is an EXCELLENT alternative to msn/icq/yahoo/i have never used AIM
It is sleek
It standardises all the messaging services
It doesn't have ads (at least Pro doesn't [I use pro])
It supports all decent messaging aspects of ICQ / MSN / YAHOO
It doesn't need 3 (or more) different programs
It is fully customisable.
You can rename those EVER SO ANNOYING people so they do not have names 3 lines long full of emoticons and text made pictures. I can't stand MSN if I use it because of this.
You can consolidate programs further, such as winamp, and weather / stock news.
I can't stress enough how much I prefer Trillian to the other messaging programs.
Trillian Pro 2 doesn't give you the messages about being outdated, so I'm guessing that I won't be seeing any changes.
It supports the MSN6 special pictures and other features.
Trillian Lite is free, and the pro version has good features that are well worth the money you pay for it, and certainly make it more functional than Yahoo/MSN/ICQ.
I can't stress my support for Trillian any more, and if Yahoo want to do this, then I will just stop using their service.
Cheers.
Quiet little ratbert.
I think that these companies should support third party applications or, atleast, ports to differnt operating systems. Anything that expands your marketshare, right?
Using GAIM/Trillian/whatever makes you a part of their "market" how? The companies are in it for the money, not brownie points. With third party clients they don't get to show ads or anything. They gain absolutely nothing from third party clients connecting. Except maybe if they require licensing fees from third party clients, but that precludes free software.
What's the difference? I have a hard time staying connected to Yahoo's stupid IM service when I'm using their own client.
Maybe they should put a little more effort into building a more robust network in the first place.
I'm not supposed to get jigs in it!
Maybe it's time to start an open-source alternative to AIM, MSN Messenger, etc... The problem is who are you going to talk to with an open source messenger other then other /. geeks. Most people are already using AIM or MSN because the people they want to talk to are. It has to also serve as a third party AIM/MSN/YAHOO/Etc Client, or no matter how good it is no body will use it to start with. Of course, as more and more people talk about their cool new program on other IM systems, more people will download it making it's abilities as a 3rd party client even more advantagouse.
The AIM client is free.
The AIM client is proprietary. Free software is at least distributed with source code.
Where's the AIM client for the Solaris OS on a SPARC CPU? You see, if the official clients for IM networks other than Jabber were free software, I would be able to recompile the Windows versions with winelib and use them on the Solaris OS, GNU/Linux, *BSD, AIX, or even SCO UNIX.
Will I retire or break 10K?
anybody can set up their own server
Obstacles to fully-distributed realtime messaging include NAT, residential Internet access acceptable use policies that often ban servers, and the load on DNS or whatever other system that the system uses to locate users.
Will I retire or break 10K?
A little birdy once told me that the large IM services cost 10 cents per user per year to run.
It only makes sense to keep out 3rd party clients.
They loose the AD revenue, on what is *their* network, that they have to support ( i.e. $$ ).
They have little, if anything, to gain from allowing others to connect. All this talk of 'increased market share' is bull.. with no ads, its just a resource drain to the owners of the IM networks.
And to clarify, I don't like the 'standard' clients for various reasons, but I can see their point.. and where its headed.. NO 3rd party clients will be allowed.. and if you circumnavigate you get hit with a DMCA suit.
Ill also fight it to the last bit..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So it is left to Yahoo! to push the idea that the best way to win is to provide an open product. Most will use the proper client, as most just do not know how to do any differently. Hopefully the MS people will switch to the Yahoo! client when they find they cannot communicate with their friends.
We should also take this as a lesson if MS ever gets their way with email. We will only be able to email our friends who use the latest version of Outlook. That version of Outlook will filter spam, which MS defines as any UCE that has not paid a monetary tribute to the beast.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Money, that most open source clients, don't have
Just to clarify your point.... money that OSS clients couldn't arrange for under free software licenses even if they had it.
They could demand 0.1 cent per copy distributed that precludes distribution under most open source licenses.
open Office
That's the solution, right there. If you want to open Office documents, go to OpenOffice.org. In fact, its .doc import filter seems to work even better than Microsoft's own, especially when trying to recover damaged documents.
Just don't try to go to OpenOrifice.org. You won't like it.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Many of the PCs at the lab i'm at right now have Trillian installed. I can run them and log-in to the Stupid Users' IM accounts! Of course it's the Stupid Users' responsibility, but it's also partly the software provider's responsibility to make software that is right for its userbase.
(In contrast, mozilla user profiles are inaccessible to others on Win2k machines.)
this is news? yahoo's been doing this in secret for a while if I understand correctly, they're just publicly doing it now because msn and aol have done it with little complaints from the user. fuck proprietary IM protocols, there's still IRC and jabber. IRC is timeless and will be around forever it seems. so really, what's the big deal (other than having friends on those protocols) people will start getting pissed off when those companies start pulling crap without any regard for the user, or start charging money to use their software. I bet in about 10 years, the terms proprietray and software wont be in the same sentence as much as it has for the past 3 or 4 decades, hoping that things go as planned. Peoples' wills are too strong, and people do find ways around raw deals, there are people getting upset with how many times they find that their machine has another exploit, and how it's just patched over and over again, with no actual fix to the general problem, oh well is what I say, let these people do what they wish, because it'll eventually hurt them, they forget as much as people like being guided around like a blind helpless children, they also want their freedom and the ability to do what they wish without being locked out of/into things. The issue is that not many people know of jabber or of irc (surprisingly!) so, what's needed is more word of various opensource protocols and formats and software in general. hell, put up little banners on your websites about various projects, even if you have to make the banners. best way we'll get outta the proprietary stranglehold, so issues like these are merely luaghed at in the future, you know? so the next time when some company pouts and wants the user to succumb to its wishes, people will just point and laugh and go walk off. sum it up, this isnt that big of a problem, there are thousands of other methods to talk to people, USENET, email, IRC, JABBER, message boards, site messengers (php based apps), phones, voicemails, voice chats, and hell, talking to people face to face, writing letters, etc. So really, this isnt that big of a problem in general, just a slight inconvience, and besides.. Who uses yahoo besides the people named XXOXXOhot2dropgrrrrrl65758765786OOOXXX anyways? most people who have 3rd party clients are smart enough not to use yahoo anyways. so once again, where's the fire? hate to sound a bit degrading or troll-ish (isnt my intent) but, it's just a lost cause. let these companies do their thing, see how long they last using closed technology in the new generation of open media and technology.
Everyone but the IM providers would be better off with a global IM standard that wasn't controlled by a single corporate identity. ISPs could easily take the load of running an IM server, and fair competition in the client market would be possible.
IM could be a service like email, but with a modern protocol and without the spam. Except it isn't because some heavyweight companies have found a way to create revenue by keeping it as it is.
Had anybody noticed the GNU/Linux ymessenger from yahoo gives the message,
"Yahoo! is upgrading to its newest version of Yahoo! Messenger on September 24, 2003. The upgrade is part of an ongoing process to continually enhance the overall quality of the Yahoo! Messenger service for our millions of users"
My question to Yahoo!, Are you going to release a new Unix version that gets rid of this message. I'm sick of seeing it pop up everytime I open ymessenger.
I was looking at how Jabber works and it seems to me a waste to have another account, why not just use email? Is there a client out there like the old Mac chat client called Combadge that just uses an email address.
http://www.pure-mac.com/irct.html#combadge
These days translates to, "we're updating to limit your freedom of functionality." This is reminiscent of how "closed for renovation" really means "we shut our doors and declared bankruptcy so we could screw our ex-employees and our suppliers"
whether it's a (perceived) good idea or not is irrelevant. if the companies don't want third-party clients connecting to a network that they own, that's their decision. all it would do is drive more folks to jabber anyway, don't we want to support free and open standards? (most of us, anyway...)
well, it's nothing one behind the ear wouldn't cure
"Third-party clients will likely be affected," Osako said. But she added: "We're open and interested in talking with all providers that share our common goal of opening the IM community in a seamless, convenient and secure manner."
Everyone can back the hell down now and go back to the SCO thing.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
"Upgrading" is as simple as changing a version string. We already have it updated in Gaim 0.69. This was a no-brainer easy-to-fix thing, as was MSN.
If any Slashdot staff are watching, please, please refrain from posting articles related to IM unless you consult someone who knows what's going on. Too many trollish comments occur, and we get too many questions in Gaim support, all pointing at Slashdot as their source for the inaccurate information as to what's happening in IM.
(Now I'll be marked as a troll, but it's hurting us IM developers more than it's helping, so I'm just going to post it anyway.)
When XP First came out and had Messenger installed and I used it, loved it, no adds, full functionality, etc. I paid full boat retail for XP on three machines, I enjoyed having that service without the adds...
Then MS Changed the structure, they gimpified the Windows messenger, and basically force you to use the add driven version if you wanted the full features. Now this wouldn't have torqed my nips so bad if they had added features to MSN Messenger that they didn't to windows, but they stripped down the version I was using!
Hence, Trillian. No Adds, and now I can connect to my friends who use AIM and Y! as well as fire up my OLD ICQ account! (Old: 1568668, and no, I'm not missing any digits... ya, I know folks with lower numbers, but I'm still pretty low!)
Zanthor
This really doesn't come as a surprise to me. Many messenger service providers are closing up their networks, only allowing the official client to connect. Users of third party clients can't/won't see the advertisements and such.
AIM on the other hand has merged with ICQ and has recently become more open to allowing third party clients such as gaim to connect.
Hate to say this but...
AOL: 1
MSN and Yahoo: 0
Yep, I can't remember the last time I've seen so many uninformed rants in one place.
No sig, sorry.
When are you gonna put 0.69 on your download page? Even the source tarballs are 0.68. Is the updated version only in the CVS?
I use Gaim and I do find that notice from Yahoo a bit annoying and hope gaim updates the protocal soon. :(
Just to be sure I did download the latest version of gaim but it's not helping.
If we do reach the deadline and I lose contact with Yahoo IM. Goodbye YIM.
I don't actually exist.
Just FYI: I can barely keep MSN Messenger connected for five minutes at a time. HOWEVER, Trillian Pro stays connected very reliably to MSN.
Thanks for the update. I'm checking Portage now. if the Gentoo person responsible for updating GAIM's ebuild is behind, I'll do what I can to expidite.
(just getting the hang of ebuilds but simple version changes should be easy to fix)
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
via GAIM about all this. The first thought I had about all this is that "Once again, vendor lock-in rears its ugly head as a business model."
I'll not claim any sort of objectivity in the matter, even in this august forum. The business(es) in question certainly won't, either.
Regardless of vendor lock-in, I will give Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, etc. this much credit: They know the import of being the "de facto" (everyday) standard as opposed to being the "official" (RFC) standard.
Do what I did: randomly ask your Joe Users what they think about (for example) Sun's "Mad Hatter" distro, or Linux in general. Even if it *could* save them a few mil USD, provable with quotes on paper.
Guess what? Nobody has any clue that there's anything else. If there is, they don't wanna know abour it - they already have a (Win NT) system. If it's not on prime-time TV I guess it doesn't exist.
The whole thing is very reminiscent of the late 1880's railroads in the USA. Everybody had their own track guage and locomotive. Everybody was trying to *be* the standard, instead of seeing the greater goal of the passengers, freight, (clients) etc; which was, to get from point A to point B as painlessly as possible.
Sorry bout all that, just had to let it all out. "The devil you know..." and all that.
C|N>K
Nobody uses anything besides AIM or ICQ anyway. The only people I know who use MSN are students from India. And the only people I know who use Yahoo! are old people and dumb people. Everyone else and there mother uses AIM or ICQ or both. And the best client for that on all OSes (besides mac I think) is gaim. http://gaim.sf.net
I don't know why you would use something else. It's just dumb. I mean, seriously, do you like advertising and paying money that much???
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
The Unix builds of Yahoo! Messenger also give off the discontinuation message, I emailed Yahoo! Unix Messenger Support about it last week with no reply.
There is a long tradition of reduced price or no price alternative access to software and services for non-commercial, personal or educactional use.
It's a perfectly legitimate thing to request. It also potentially betters the provider's image among that community. And some companies -- suprise -- are willing to provide free or reduced price software and services even if the benefit is negligible, just because it is a nice thing to do.
And what is this nonsense about market, profit, blah, blah, blah. Yes, it's quite well understood that Ayn Rand is your personal saviour, but can we perhaps have just one single conversation without dragging the great and powerful Market into it?
It just isn't funny anymore; really.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
Guys, it is their protocol, their servers, and if you don't like it you have no right to bitch about it.
Make your own IM systems.
ummmmmm?? free, geekish, and pretty much cool.
IM is for AOL subscribers anyway!
To put it in perspective, imagine how telephone service would be if my Kyocera cellphone could not receive calls from Nokia phones. I know we have to use different cells that use the various schemes, but if the providers didn't gate traffic to each other, nobody would use them. The only reason we put up with this crap from the IM services is because (most of us) don't pay anything for them.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Yes, it's in CVS only, but 0.69 will be released as soon as we can. You don't want it in its current state until a couple of bugs are fixed.
I think the most significant reason jabber isn't more widely used is people network effects, not the clients. Most people use one network, and so do their friends. It's like file formats.
:P) regardless of if you have any jabber contacts to start with - As more people get dissatisfied they will get a jabberid. I did this a year ago and now I have most of my contacts on jabber :)
To grow the jabber userbase someone (you) needs to take a lead - Register a jabber ID (and use it, obviously not on it's own
Use jabber for IM
Jabber
Jabberstudio - most jabber projects are listed
I should have said 0.69cvs, not 0.69. Gaim 0.69 will be out when we can get it out, but it'll be there before the apparent cut-off date.
...there will still always be some form of free IM client on the 'net. Writing client/server software for instant-messaging is fairly trivial. The only (ok, ok, I know, I make it sound like it's an easy task, but just humor me for a second) true roadblock is bandwidth.
...and heck, there's always IRC, right?
If AOL decides to charge people to download AIM, people will use YIM, if Yahoo decides to charge, people will use MSN Messenger, if Microsoft decides to charge, you'll see how quickly a bunch of developers (/.ers maybe?) get together to write their own messaging client/server. I'd give it a week, if that much.
it'd be cool if a p2p im project got off the ground.
imagine crypto communication standard, with a decentralised redundant fault tolerant database which will store a contact list for when you log in through a new pc, and one page with enough criteria to make searching for users a reality if they choose to add in contact into, while mainting unique numeric identity for each user. (none of that unique name billybob802.11g crap..somethign similar to icq). the hardest thing i see in a system like this would be keeping spammers off it, that and possibly keeping a 'friendly' databse host from attempting to crack some/all of the users login information their helping to host.
damn, somedays i wish i were a coder.
Troll, Troll, go away and flame again some other day
Also there have been many other software releases which were successful before Trillian and no one cared, the reason Trillian gets attention is because its actually a company.
Jabber has been around all this time and no one used it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
They aren't obliged, of course, but they're silly not to. It just ticks people off, and IM software is so simple it's impossible to weed out 3rd party software. I'm sure I'm not the only programmer who had to write an IM server/client in Networking 352.
I can't really see any way they could have "Accidentally" broken backwards compatibility. I'm sure there could be a way, but at the heart it's about the most basic type of network communication. There really isn't much to change, unless they were going to try and make it secure, which, of course, is massively unlikely.
Just one more futile attempt to keep people from improving on what you started. Give it up. It's human nature.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
This is meant as a serious question, not a troll...
I a hardcore geek. So are many of my friends. Many of friends are not geeks at all - just enjoy the Internet. Same with my coworkers and my family.
I know a lot of people, but I don't think I've ever once been asked for my MSN or Yahoo! messenger Screen Name. I was honestly under the impression that the VAST VAST majority of people just use AIM.
Am I wrong?
Sig.i>
Whats stopping yahoo from encrypting a tiny chunk of their protocol and then crush anyone with the dmca who tries reverse engineering the protocol
Ditto.
Of course, as others have pointed out, an updated Linux client is available now from them.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
This is the only rational (if stupid nevertheless) explanation explanation I've heard so far.
I use GAIM for chat. If Yahoo! stopped working with it, I'd use something besides Yahoo!, not GAIM. But this has happened before. I doubt we have anything to worry about.
JABBER
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
HP Jornada 720 handheld PC 2000 with Windows CE comes with a copy of Yahoo! Messenger in rom. It doesn't work now - Yahoo did something to the server so it stopped logging in about a year ago. The machine's not three years old yet and is still one of the best clamshell handhelds out on the market, and here it's carrying dead weight in ROM, at no fault of HP. Unlike more modern PocketPCs, it doesn't have flash rom so it can't be overwritten.
It can't be replaced at the cost of normal memory either, because HPC (or even PocketPC) versions of Yahoo! Messenger are not available anymore, they simply vanished about the same time when it stopped working, without as much as a mention or explanation.
Needless to say this didn't improve my opinion of Yahoo. The ONLY free IM client for HPC 2000 that still works and properly handles cyrillic is AIM. And the American version is not free, British is. (!)
P.S. And the only Jabber client for HPC is both non-free and really really sucks.
In Soviet Russia... RUSSIANS comment on YOU.
you know.. this is nuts... i JUST finished compiling gaim .68 when i read this.. i was reading slashdot while the make was running.. ah well back to sourceforge.. (and yes i DID see that gaim .69 is only in CVS.. but still.. if i'd known i would have skipped .68 and gone straight to .69)
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
Didn't MS imply that they will require clients to produce a license certificate of some sort to connect?
Your logic is perfect and on target, thats exactly what I was trying to tell these people.
Its people who want to leech like this who kill everything, open source will get killed if people think "well why should I ever pay a dime, its free so I'll just take it!"
They forget that someone had to code the software, reminds me of the millions of Linux Mandrake users who want to use Linux Mandrake but cant join the club, or people who want games in Linux but wont join Transgaming, wont buy games from Loki, etc.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
No, no license check occurs via software. IM develeopers could ask and get (pay?) one, but connections from unlicensed clients are likely to go unnoticed.
blah
Seems that the Big Three in IM are all doing the same thing. And why wouldn't they? It's their network and their protocol, they can do as they please. If you don't want to be locked out, use an open protocol like IRC or Jabber.
(TOC is open and MSN used to be, but their networks are still controlled by corporations.)
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
your cousin's name is furnace, he's a fucking dwarf
Whats your problem? Maybe he doesn't want seventy different fucking IM clients and user accounts for each and every fucking one of them?
Retard.
If I wanted to play omniscient gov-god-monkey advocate and listen to all the little people I would happily look the other way while large corporations do as they please in exchange for allowing me to drop a six-pack of full cabinets in their colo and play transparent proxy/passive capture for them on the ports for their chat servers. In exchange for that favor I would gladly let my hired guns, fresh out of college in drunk love with their newfound uber-freedoms and control of sheeple powers have a great time playing with peeling entire conversations from all over the world out of the packet-captures to and from aggregation points. Why, with my newfound patriot powers of persuasion, I'd flit from network to network riding the packet love-chain. Thanks to eminent domain, all your asses are belongs to the gov-god-monkeys.
As for IRC...sheesh, that's so twenty years ago and full of spooks relaying out of half-a-dozen compromised eye-cattle desktops (thanks to a patriotic company willing to play the strawman to keep the shoppers of the US safe--ahahahahah), too much trouble for what it's worth. Besides, doing that would risk tipping the hands of too many kiddiot/porn/mp3/mpeg/Jihad-plants. Can't be playing your hand like that and still be the good guy with tens of millions in taxpayer dollars to ferret out the bad apples. At least the press is free and makes shoppers feel good--hey more sales!
The nice thing about IM is that unlike email, you don't have to mulch through smegs of uuencoded pap. Nice juicy text, quick n' easy. But to feast upon the schweet schweet innocence of instant messaging...now that's good stuff.
Passwords, phone numbers, meeting times, places, and all the side-band transfers are just cake, take'm or leave'm, or checksum them for those patriots at the RIAA/MPAA.
The truly wise among you will see IM for what it really is and kick it and adopt a Freenet approach to use random nodes to transport your messages with encryption. Sure it sounds like a great deal of trouble to go through just to get a list of things to pick up for dinner on the way home, or to say hi, or to track your employees, but your freedom is paid for by your vigilance or by the forward looking few who can see the trouble ahead and plan around it.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
My experience of Jabber servers is that they're pretty resource intensive, and a little difficult to manage. I'm not sure if this has changed, but it's something of a stumbling block. As a friend of mine said, it's a shame someone like Apple didn't adopt Jabber. I believe all it needs is someone with a bit of influence behind it.
What about using clients that encrypt IM traffic (ICQ, AIM, Jabber?), are they safe for work? If your company runs one of those corporate IM monitoring packages can they still read your IMs? Is the chat encrypted from client to client? I have a friend who's worried about her company eavesdropping on her Yahoo IM chats, I don't have that problem no matter what client I use because it runs on my home PC and I just rdesktop to it from my work PC. I was going to suggest she switch to ICQ or AIM for the encryption capabilites, but false sense of security is worse then none.
-Solo
There is every reason for Trillian to exist. It is a compact aplication that chats to lots of chat services. Just because it isnt open source, does not make it bad (as many people seem to think)
The FREE version to Trilian functions perfectly well, but they save the real whizz-bang stuff for the commercial Pro version. This versions chat mechanism is virtually identical, but what you are paying for is all the enhancements to the client, for example extra event items and interface options.
I like the idea of Trillian being a commercial entity as it forces them to offer a far better client that the network defaults or else people ownt buy it and they go out of business.
I have no sig yet I must scream.
Don't you ever browse your application preferences when you install new software? YM lets you check boxes specifically to disable that sort of thing:
- At the top of the "Messages" panel, you see "When I receive a new message". Change it from "Automatically show the message window" to "Minimize the message window to the taskbar" and uncheck "Show messages at the bottom right of the screen".
- In the "Alerts and Sounds" panel, uncheck "Enable sound alerts", look at the "Alert me when:" box and select "A friend comes online", then below "Alert me by:" uncheck both "Showing a message at the bottom right corner of screen" and "Displaying a message box".
Geez, Yahoo is probably the most customizable IM client out there. You don't have to like it, but at least admit that it's only annoying because you didn't bother to customize it.It was as simple as changing the version number being sent. No big deal.
Until Yahoo changes their setup to recognize that version number, too. Repeat ad nauseam.
I've read a lot of comments saying that unofficial IM clients are 'stealing' bandwidth, server cycles, etc from the service providers because they circumvent things like ads.
Since I don't think that unofficial IM clients are going to disappear soon (and I hope they don't, I paid for Trillian Pro) I think that eventually the advertising model for IM will change. Instead of having ads in the client, you will receive an ad via an IM at a regular interval. Then, if you want to get rid of the ads you can pay $5 a month or something like that. The instant message is the only thing that is guaranteed to work in every client connecting to the service, and it will also get more of your attention than a little picture in your client.
Let's face it yahoo and msn messengers were never designed with security in mind. With the advant of worms like blaster the time has come to make sure that messengers are secure. They have a duty to update their protocol as they need to, but there has to come a point where it needs no further updating. I am a Trillian Pro user, and Have had no problems with yahoo since I have seen these messages and I probably never will. These companies need to wake up and try to work together for a change if you ask me.
I don't either. I use Trillian so I only have one IM client. That doesn't mean that YIM sucks.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
I remember when everything on the internet was FUN! and FREE! The way people try and justify large companies charging money for things nowadays REALLY peeves me. In my eyes in supporting these people are supporting SPAM, ADWARE etc.
Websites should be free to visit and browse and get information from. Like this one! You shouldn't need to give personal details.
I don't have anything good to say about any of these websites trying to capitalize on things that used to be free. Its as if people dont realize that in supporting this, you are supporting changing the internet into a place where it costs money to subscribe to a site to obtain information.
I miss the old internet.
The way people support this crap nowadays, and i'm seeing a lot of it here, makes me wan to start an internet porn spamming corporation.
But I can't bring myself to do this.
Yeah, people suck, and when the masses come to the internet, so does the internet.
BTW, if you believe it costs yahoo 10 cents oer message you send. You need to give your head a shake.
Yahoo's own official messenger client for *nix systems gets this message too. Either they plan to faze out *nix support, or their developers totally forgot that they have official non-Windows/Mac clients. Either of those would NOT surprise me. Heck, maybe even the Mac client gets it.
... that you love playing first person shooters, where the object is to ... " kill all the other players to be successful."
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
ISPs deploy e-mail servers only because SMTP and POP3 have been around since the dawn of the public Internet. Jabber is several years less mature than SMTP/POP3 and may take a decade to become established to the point where ISPs offer a Jabber account as part of the basic residential Internet access plan.
it's a simple, well understood problem, with simple, well understood solutions.
Most of these are social. How are users going to talk SBC, AOL, MSN, or any of the other three-letter ISPs into offering Jabber servers?
Will I retire or break 10K?
It is time that we rid ourselvesof having all these closed formats. we need somthing simmilar to html, for im.
Tragek
It's all about advertisements, right?
They don't get money for they system if users use a free client. IMO the native clients for the protocols suck almost anytime.
Perhaps we really need to get to free technologies like XML-based jabber. But it would need time and big companies like Yahoo! or even MSN have at least the powers to found communities.
There is in my eyes no need for X (a multiply of 2) protocols for IM. One would be sufficient. One with free or even some advertisement-sponsored clients from the companies then. The main existence reason of the alternative clients under Windows is to link the protocols together. Perhaps the companies should really rethink their attitude and get together.
This guy is right! If this upgrade is going to break all the old clients, then unix users of Yahoo Messenger are going to be shut out of the loop.
Trillian doesn't run on Unix, and Everybuddy is unusably buggy. Yahoo has yet to release an update of the unix ymessenger, currently at 0.99.19-beta and has been for a very long time. It's a buggy POS, but at least it's usable.
As I have said in posts in the past, the cost benefit analysis can be pretty subjective - The ISPs may figure the benefit in abstract ways to justify the cost - My guess is that the IM services offer a twofold benefit to the ISP:
Firstly, it is a value added service - It is in the best interest of the ISP to ensure that this service adds value for the customer - Therefore, it makes sense that some would choose to control access to this service - It's not the best PR in the world, but it does send a message that they care about their existing user base
Secondly, it is a retention mechanism and differentiator - You can get email serivces anywhere, but IM is a pretty heavily used application - I personally use a secure IM mechanism on a daily basis as part of my engineering work - The key is that I once read that AOL spent something like $6USD to obtain each customer (all of those CDs amortized across the customer base) and they need to retain those customers to pay for the CDs and the 1000+ free hours of operation that they push - Oddly, it is AIM that is staying more open, go figure
Follow the money - It is always about the money
well, no evil intenions , perhaps, but the end result was less than spectacular for me. i'm blocked out of YM since wednesday, and i had _NO_ , repeat, _NO_ , warnings about what was going to happen. i use^Hused YM daily. i thought i was going nuts like maybe the gateway was geborken?ed or something because it kept on telling me that it was a password problem, but i could log into yahoo and read my email.
i'm still using OS 8.1, so i'm stuck with YM version 2, until either (a) you buy me a copy of OSX, (b) some clever monkey at yahoo ports YM to linuxPPC, (c) i find an x86 in the trash that is better than my horking custom PPC, or (d) a lottery. way to go, yahoo.
--
happy dreams are an option.
If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
Yes but the problem is that in order to install it I have to severly downgrade my system. (running MDK 9.1) to where most of my other software doesn't work. Now if I was running Red Hat 6.2 I bet it would work. Doesn't work on My FreeBSD 5.1 box either. (Ok it does start. can't read the fonts in the message windows no matter what I change them to.. )
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.