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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
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.
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.
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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"?
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
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.
The best cure for insomnia is realizing that it is already time to get up. EsteEncanto.com - Blog on technology, urban
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.
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?
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
Whether or not you agree with it, the free market produces products. If these products are in demand, then the producers succeed.
/. when the open source and freeware developers get shut down or out too.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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