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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");
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.
And thus, through stubborn obstinance, open standards will gain acceptance!!! Everyone will be able to talk with everyone else!
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
There's no economic incentive to operate IRC networks either, yet they continue to thrive.
Someone out there is willing to donate resources to make it possible.
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?
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.)