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."

Comments

Bad move?

[The Evil Plush Toy]

I think that these companies should support third party applications or, atleast, ports to differnt operating systems. Anything that expands your marketshare, right?

Re:Bad move?

[lederhosen]

I do not see what you mean.

Yahoo has a monopoly on one of the common used
communication protocols (like word .doc)

Gaim can read/write many protocols (like OpenOffice)
but will always be one step after.

It is not in neither Microsoft's nor Yahoo's intrest
to support competative products.

Re:Bad move?

[Clockwurk]

And now, the real reason behind the blockage...

IM services cost alot of money to run. That money is recouped either through banner ads or selling of information. Third party clients do not reinburse IM service providers. They steal (bandwidth, ad impressions, etc.) from MS, AOL, Yahoo, and ICQ and the owners are unhappy. AOL wouldn't give a flying fuck if you used some other IM client, as long as they aren't footing the bill for server and bandwidth. If GAIM wants to give away the client, thats fine, but they aren't entitled to give away MS/AOL/Yahoo/ICQs bandwith and server usage.

The IM service providers should be a little more upfront with the reasons behind the blockage, but even if they aren't, you still don't have any right to be pissed off.

Re:Bad move?

[ooPo]

Two points...

1) Obviously these 3rd party clients are offering something that Yahoo/MS does not. Why not up the quality of the 1st party clients and attract people to use them? Get those advertising bucks!

2) The more people that use a IM network, the more use it is to everyone using it. If all your friends use AIM, you're going to use AIM. Chances are this will mean some of you will run the 1st party client. There's the benefit of letting people 'steal' your bandwidth.

Re:Bad move?

[k12linux]

They steal (bandwidth, ad impressions, etc.)

Sigh. I'm just getting so tired of the bantering around of the words "steal", "theft", etc. They are providing a service and these clients are using the service. Until the company providing the service says "you aren't allowed to use it" nobody is stealing anything.

Yeah, that sucks but...

[El]

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?

Re:Yeah, that sucks but...

[commodoresloat]

There's got to be more economic incentive to provide a service that works for everyone than there is to provide a service that only works for some people.

Re:Yeah, that sucks but...

[pimpinmonk]

No easy solution, but another interesting problem: people don't use different messengers based on how good their service or technology is, they use what their friends use. Two places I've lived, Boston and New York, both have predominantly AIM users that I've encountered. But in Toronto, MSN Messenger is most common. I would actually prefer ICQ, but I can't make all my friends shift, nor can I tell new acquaintances "what online chat program do you use? Oh, that... why don't you switch to this?" It's just not feasible, so everyone sticks to the same thing.

Re:Yeah, that sucks but...

[El]

Let's see... AOL provides an IM service for AOL users to leverage AOL sales. If they let just anybody connect to the servers, what incentive would you have to shell out $27/month for AOL. Ditto for MSN. Not sure what Yahoo's econmic model is, but presumably it has something to do with advertising that you don't see if you don't use their client. Let's put it this way: how long could the phone company stay in business if all calls were free and their only revenue stream was from selling phones... but anybody else could connect a phone not made by them to the network? Think they might have some powerful incentive to force you to use their phones?

Re:Yeah, that sucks but...

[Feztaa]

Well, there's a network effect that happens with IM protocols; if nobody uses AIM, there's no reason for anybody else to use it. The only reason I have an AIM account on my gaim buddy list is because I have a couple friends who use AIM. Theoretically, those people using AOL would derive less value from the service if they weren't able to chat with me.

Coincidentally, I don't have a YIM account, and I don't need one because I don't know anybody who does. Therefore, YIM loses.

As long as...

[commodoresloat]

The upgrade is part of an ongoing process to continually enhance the overall quality of the Yahoo! Messenger service for our millions of users'."

....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.

why use IM?

[Coneasfast]

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

Wishful thinking

[levik]

I am hoping this change won't trigger a new serioes of IM wars. I'm sure that if incompatibility is introduced, Trillian and Co. will be quick to conform - as long as they're not made to attempt to hit a moving target things should be ok.

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.

Re:too bad

[IamNotWitchboy]

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.

Yeah but Trillian steals their revenue.

[HanzoSan]

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.

Re:Yeah but Trillian steals their revenue.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether or not you agree with it, the free market produces products. If these products are in demand, then the producers succeed.

Case in point is the IM world. I, for one, despise each and every official IM client out there. ICQ used to be usable, back before they started naming the versions by years (I have a UIN under 1,000,000 so that should be some indication of how long I've used it).

Yahoo Messenger is fucking annoying, doing such lovely things as dragging me out of other applications with its 'user is online' messages and popping new message windows to the front.

MSN has an ugly interface as well as being fairly resource-intensive for just an IM program.

Finally, I have friends on all these networks. I don't want to run 3 different programs.

So what has demand created? Jabber, Trillian, Fire, etc etc. Is it fair for the network providers who are letting people get onto their networks for no charge? Not really, but them's the breaks. Does it deprive them of ad revenue? Probably, though I suspect from my observations of friends and family that most people use the official clients.

My point is that the demand is there. Demand makes product. In the open-source world, it's the itch that someone wants to scratch. In the commercial world, it's the potential to tap into a market that has been created by demand. You have this opinion that making money from another person's product is wrong, but that's just idiotic. Why should the rules be any different for the people who aren't making money? If you want to argue that people shouldn't be allowed to connect to a person's service without official software, then don't come crying to /. when the open source and freeware developers get shut down or out too.

Re:Yeah but Trillian steals their revenue.

[MrWa]

My point is that the demand is there. Demand makes product. In the open-source world, it's the itch that someone wants to scratch. In the commercial world, it's the potential to tap into a market that has been created by demand. You have this opinion that making money from another person's product is wrong, but that's just idiotic.

So, if the demand was there and people liked to watch movies in YOUR living room it would be perfectly acceptable for me to sell tickets to everyone so they can come and use your TV. You, of course, get nothing out of this but you need to maintain your house clean and orderly.

Millions of people go into McDonald's a year - should I be able to sell my own hamburgers inside of the resteraunt if the demand is there? It isn't fair that they should get all the profit from those people going there.

Don't come crying to /. just because you can't use someone elses network with paying for it when I can't use your long distance service for free.

Fighting a Losing Battle

[RoninM]

These companies need to get smart. These protocol changes are going to be reverse engineered. There's just too many people who are too smart and too willing to work in groups for lockout strategies to work. A protocol change won't chase away these guys; it makes them drool.

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.

Re:Not really...

[_avs_007]

But don't you still need a Yahoo account to IM with? When you sign up for a Yahoo account, you are still signing up with a Yahoo account.

Isn't this like arguing that if I sign up for a Yahoo account, I should use Yahoo's browser to check my email, instead of IE, Netscape, or [name your favorite browser]?

There are still adds when you log into yahoo to check your email. They still have your information. Etc etc etc.

If it costs so much to run an IM server, and they cannot recoup their costs, perhaps they need to rethink their business model. Perhaps they need to overhaul the system altogether and design a protocol that is cheaper to maintain, etc.

Common Denominator Wins

[The Monster]

we'll just use email as we have been for years.

Email is historically the Internet's killer app, precisely because of interoperability. People can exchange messages without worrying about what client the recipient is using (other than the recurring argument about HTML content).

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.

Re:Stupid Question...

[LucidityZero]

The answer to this is very simple.

Not all geeks only have geek friends. For example, right now my AIM buddy list has 173 people on it. Some of these are coworkers, some are family and a vast majority of them are just random friends. I could probably name about a dozen or two dozen people out of that number that use IRC/are capable enough to use IRC. However, random cute girl from English class doesn't use IRC, and is not going to bother to learn how to use a much more confusing protocol.

If the entire world were made up of Slashdot browsers and Linux geeks, your arguement would make sense. But, it simply isn't. The majority of the people out there are Windows users who don't WANT to know what's actually going on. And that is also the majority of my buddy list.

I'm sorry, but random cute girl from English class doesn't give a fuck about "Open Standards", etc, etc. She just wants to chat with her friends. And I want to chat with her. So, I will continue to use GAIM to talk on AIM.