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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."
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
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.
Thank you. Drive through.
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
Yahoo! and AOL does provide Windows, Mac, and Linux/Unix clients. Both also offer online Java clients for use on public computers.
$cat
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.
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
I think that these companies should support third party applications or, atleast, ports to differnt operating systems.
Yahoo has had for some time a Java Client... does that count?
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Miranda is open source freeware too!
http://www.miranda-im.org/
Jabber is awesome. I don't understand why it isn't more widely used. Anyway, Jabber is somewhat decentralized because your IM is like an email address: somebody@somewhere.com. So Jabber user IDs specify the server as well as the username, meaning that Jabber can be a huge network of IM servers much like the email network. IMHO, when you sign up for an ISP, you should get youremail@yourISP.com as your email and a jabber account with the same ID. It's a perfect way for small ISPs to offer IM services to their users.
Maybe Jabber isn't widely used because the free clients suck. Please, somebody, make a *simple* Jabber client. By simple, I mean this: it asks you if you have an account. If no, it asks you what jabber ID you would like. If you put in an @server.com, it connects you to that server, otherwise it picks a nice default server for you (like jabber.org). Then you're done. No 10-page "account creation" wizards, no asking about port numbers and "jabber directory" information, no fooling with "resources". Just connect! The client should also be able to sign into other messaging services on the client side, because Jabber bridges require server support that may or may not be there, and AOL or MSN can easily block any one server from connecting on behalf of its users. The server is the wrong place to integrate with other IM systems, it should be done on the client.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Wha... Miranda is great and GPLed
For some reason, everyone at my office uses YIM. I think the reason is because Yahoo! has an "enterprise" version of their messenger, and it has some cool features like a directory of all the employees that have corporate YIM names and encrypted chatting and such.
I'm not too impressed with the software myself, however.
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
Yes indeedy, Jabber is good.
It has other advantages over other protocols:
1. The protocol is openly documented; any schmuck can write a Jabber client without having to go to pains to reverse engineer a proprietary protocol.
2. The protocol is based on XML, so it's easily human-readible and readily extensible.
3. All of the Jabber clients that I know of are open source, with all of the benefits that that entails.
Though, one of the problems with your argument is that most people's JID's are @jabber.org, so even though the jabber network is totally distributed like email as you say, the Jabber folks do somehow manage to fund the jabber.org server without charging the users any money.
Please, somebody, make a *simple* Jabber client.
Rhymbox ?
The client should also be able to sign into other messaging services on the client side...
Trillian ?
"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.)
Just FYI: I can barely keep MSN Messenger connected for five minutes at a time. HOWEVER, Trillian Pro stays connected very reliably to MSN.
Funny, Trillian doesn't profit from my use of the IM networks.
You see, I use their freeware version of Trillian, which is still a superior product to the original IM clients (at least for my use).
Most Trillian users do the same. Maybe it's because we're cheap, maybe it's because we don't need those features.
But the money they make out of the "pro" version is evidently from people who demand more features than just "accessing other people's networks". And those needs are obviously not satisfied by the market.
My point is that there ARE reasons for Trillian to exist. Reasons enough that a lot of computer illiterate users prefer to download a 0.x version of a program from an unknown tiny software company (with limited/none support for things like webcams, file transfers, etc) to free "authorized" clients from such big-shots as Microsoft and AOL.
Reasons like:
- Annoying pop-up SPAM messages from third parties every 10 minutes.
- Truly horrid user interfaces.
- Multiple conversations is an organizational nightmare.
- Insane memory requirements for a silly IM client.
- Inability to organize your contacts along more than one service.
Only the last one requires anything more than basic competence on the part of the software provider; and I can assure you, if they were solved, running multiple clients wouldn't bother clients any more than running the 700 icons in the typical Windows taskbar (from Realmedia to Printer Driver Utilities to P2P clients) does right now.
In a sense, you're right. There is no reason for Trillian to exist. If it were not for the incompetence of the rest of the industry, they wouldn't stand a chance.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Yahoo does provide a linux client but it is nowhere as good as the windows version. The linux client always gives problems on RH 9 (not sure about other distros) where incoming messages cannot be seen.
Also, if you are a gaim user, you know that an all-in-client with so many plugins just cannot be beaten by having to startup multiple programs for all the protocols out there.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
Didn't MS imply that they will require clients to produce a license certificate of some sort to connect?