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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."
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");
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
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
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'
Thank you. Drive through.
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"?
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And thus, through stubborn obstinance, open standards will gain acceptance!!! Everyone will be able to talk with everyone else!
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
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
I 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.
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
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Wonderful, another few years of communication incompatibilities until one winner emerges. The problem with computers is that we need monopolies.
Fighting against each other until only one surviver is left over isn't the only way to live. Cooperation is possible if the players do not assume that they have to kill all the other players to be successful. Strange concept, isn't it?
Universal standards would work in a perfect world, but you would need an authoritative government implementing them.
The internet didn't need a government to develop universal standards.
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.
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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.
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Miranda is open source freeware too!
http://www.miranda-im.org/
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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?" `":" #");}
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
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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
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Wha... Miranda is great and GPLed
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
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 ?
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.
"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.)
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.
Just FYI: I can barely keep MSN Messenger connected for five minutes at a time. HOWEVER, Trillian Pro stays connected very reliably to MSN.
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.
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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.
Whats stopping yahoo from encrypting a tiny chunk of their protocol and then crush anyone with the dmca who tries reverse engineering the protocol
Didn't MS imply that they will require clients to produce a license certificate of some sort to connect?