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Yahoo Messenger Blocks Outside IM Clients
jj00 writes "CNET News is reporting that Yahoo has started blocking 3rd party Messenger clients from their service. The article is about Trillian, but I have noticed that my gaim client hasn't been working for the past few days." As reported earlier.
Cerulean Studios already fought AOL and won.
If you hoof it on over to Trillian's website and logging into the member's section, you can get the beta Yahoo-patch.
How's that for response time?
If you're a paying Trillian customer, you can download the beta of their next major release, which works just fine with the Yahoo! Messenger network even after this change. I believe they've said they'll port the protocol change back to the free version as well. I'm running the beta and haven't noticed any disruption of service.
Many "potential spammers" can, of course, just use their official clients. They could, if they wanted, take the time to send identical messages to people one at a time.
If they're only concerned about spammers, and third-party clients allow you to spam, they just need to implement some anti-spam measures on the server side of things (read: Block users from sending too many messages out in some intelligent manner or another), not block out many people who'd like to talk to others on their network but use a client they might trust or like more.
It sounds to me like they must not care about third party clients.. Why not simply tell the truth in their statement?
Was Yahoo not one of the founding members of the IMUnified group, whose sole purpose was to unify with goliaths such as MSFT to fight the tyranny of AOL? Aforementioned tyranny being comprised of AOL blocking outise clients from accessing their users.
What goes around comes around. Out of protest I am planning to use my AOL IM exclusively indefinitely unitil this is solved.
Starting with a work-related mandate to use Yahoo's IM service, I've since become quite a "Sticky" Yahoo visitor. My calendar is linked with their service, I forward a number of mail addresses there - I generate them money!
How, you ask? I am given, at the least (counting calendar, email, and news) three opportunities per visit to interact with Yahoo's advertisers and sponsors. This is a direct result of being a Yahoo IM user, and discovering how their other services integrated with their messaging client. While I cannot comment on MSN, and I don't dream of endorsing AOL for myriad reasons, I feel that Yahoo's services were robust enough to keep a technically demanding user such as myself attracted to the brand. In interacting with memebers of Yahoo's chat community, it seems to be the case that moderate to heavy users of it's chat/IM service also quickly adopt other Yahoo services. This equates to more unique pageviews per day from IM/chat users than off-the-street users and perusers. Yahoo IM users, on average, tend to be loyal out of necessity - not necessity becasue they are in any way indentured to format, design or interoperability to Yahoo, but becasue things "just work."
This move, to isolate IM users who may be using a different client (is it even reasonable to assume users will be happy with just one?) services is tragic. Yahoo has clearly missed the point that IM users are not IM users alone, but rather comprise some of the best audiences for exposure to their ads, and therefore, a direct path to revenues.
This move, to block users who've already made a conscious choice to use other Yahoo services is a faux pas, to say the least.
"I'm disrespectful to dirt! Can you see I am serious?"
If you read the news.com article cited further up you'll realize that Yahoo states they have every intent with working with 3rd-party clients, and that they fully support a standards initiative.
They're basically just saying "Hey, we're putting this upgrade out there, and it's probably gonna break your client. You might want to talk to us and we'll tell you how to fix it."
What?