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.

Comments

nah

[Anonymous Coward]

More like "great way to stop giving the service away for free to freeloaders who generate no ad revenue" am i rite?

Re:nah

[Macgruder]

You have a point.

But the question I have is this:

Is Yahoo! (and other IM servers) cutting off their own feet but blocking access to Trillian?

I use Trillian extensively, and have been doing so for two year. So do all of my friends. 55-60 people.

But if Yahoo! blocks Trillian, we'll just switch to another service. Most often I use MSN, but I can easily switch to ICQ or AOL if MSN starts blocking Trillian.

So, there's 50 users that Yahoo! lost, how many more times will this scenario be duplicated across the planet?

I think Yahoo! just made the same error other net services vendors (and the RIAA) made: They blocked usuage of their product by 'unathorized' (in their eyes) users. They are obviously hoping that people will start using Y! (or buy the CD, in the case of RIAA). But without giving the users a usable, convenient, and value-added service, users will just go someplace else. In the case of Y!, I'll drop it. CD's, I'll listen to what's on the radio, or net-cast, or listen to the MP3s I have.

They don't gain my loyalty, unless they offer a real alternative.

ex.

Y!: We don't want you to use their program for our service. It costs us money to maintain it, and when you don't use our program, we don't get any of it back.

User: But this program is easy to use, comes wit lots of neat features, and deosn't suck up a huge amount of memory or CPU cycles.

Y!: AH, but here's our new program. Y!+ for all the other features, and Y! Lite for just the bare bones. We'll even use plug-ins so you can have JUST the features you want.

User: Gee, thanks Y!. I'll use it, and be loyal forever!

Re:nah

[darien]

So, there's 50 users that Yahoo! lost, how many more times will this scenario be duplicated across the planet?

Yes, but if these people are using Trillian, they weren't the sort of users Yahoo! wants anyway. They were using the service, but not generating any revenue to pay for it (principally by not looking at ads). Of course, Trillian users boosted Y!'s market share, and their presence made it a more attractive choice to new users, some of whom would use the official client, see the ads and generate revenue. But Y! seems to have concluded that letting Trillian users use their network for free doesn't attract enough new users of the official client to be cost-effective; so why would they encourage it?

I think Y! know exactly what they're doing. Depending on your long-term strategy, it can be better to have forty thousand customers making you a tiny profit than forty million who cost you money.

Please find a backdoor for Y! and MSN!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, I hope they find a backdoor, because I can't use either my trillian on windows and gaim on linux with yahoo anymore.
I wouldn't mind using the original Yahoo! client, however, I also have ICQ, MSN and AIM accounts that I run at the same time, so having four different big apps running at the same time is just not nice, takes space, cpu, memory and their interfaces are bloated and irrelevant for the thing I want to do: simple IM.
This is why, I have to use Trillian or Gaim: simplicty, small interfaces, easy to have all contacts in the same place.
If Yahoo or anyone else made their client to support all 4 protocols, I wouldn't have a problem using one of them instead of trillian or gaim. But until they do, I really need an integrated solution, not a mess on my desktop!

Their Network

[ultrabot]

Well, it's their network so they can block anyone they want.

If you don't like their rules (I don't), why don't create a free/open/documented IM network? Make it better than the commercial offerings, and people will come.

How's Jabber doing these days, anyway?

Re:Their Network

[ultrabot]

Here on Earth, companies don't hesitade to abuse their market position or enourmous wealth to block normal competition.

So we should just crawl into a hole and die?

IM is not owned by any company yet, let alone MSFT. An Open alternative has a good position to beat the proprietary opposition, especially as it is quite divided already. Open Standards are the "in" thing right now.

Wouldn't it be fabulous if various Corporate platforms (Notes, etc.) chose to use the Jabber protocol as the IM solution? Then everyone would be running Jabber clients already, and communicating with friends would be a natural extension of that activity. I took a look at the Jabber page, inspired by this article, and saw that they are co-operating with IETF to standardize the protocol... and therein lies the future.

Re:Their Network

[DrEldarion]

Most people are on those networks because one person initially went on. Then his friends went on because he was on. Then their frends went on because they were on, etc... and now nobody wants to change because all their friends use that network.

-- Dr. Eldarion --

Re:Their Network

[Motherfucking Shit]

It doesn't matter if you create the best mousetrap, as long as Micro$traps controls the market you will get nowhere. You can't even advertise your new trap, since Micro$traps will threaten the magazines to stop advertising in their paper if yours will get printed.

::cough:: bullshit ::cough::

Wired plugged two independent IM apps, Trillian included, giving both of them positive reviews. Doth not Microsoft advertise in Wired? I don't have the print copy of that issue but I'd be seriously surprised if there was not a Microsoft advert in it.

Where does KaZaA advertise? That's right, nowhere; they created a product that people like (as junky as it may be), so people use it, and tell their friends. When was the last time you were browsing a trade magazine and saw a full-page color ad for Apache? That's what I thought. Yet Apache is everywhere, even on Windows, even with numerous competitors.

Open source/free/alternative software doesn't need to advertise. When it's good, its user base will take care of promotion and evangelizing.

All that said, I don't really see any sort of open source IM initiative taking over. When it comes to IM, the fact is that people want to be on the same network as most or all of their friends. That means a centralized network (or at least a 100% interoperable collection of smaller networks), and that means a lot of bandwidth. Unless IBM, or Sun, or Redhat, or Google decide to pour a few spare millions into operating the infrastructure to power an open IM network, I don't see any "OSS friendly" company ever dominating the IM space.

Re:Their Network

[IamTheRealMike]

IM is not owned by any company yet, let alone MSFT. An Open alternative has a good position to beat the proprietary opposition, especially as it is quite divided already. Open Standards are the "in" thing right now.

Unfortunately, here on Earth, many people use IM to talk to non-geek friends who probably don't understand why you can't just use the "official client" anyway.

Really, posts saying "it's their network, they can do as they please" piss me off. It's like saying, "hey, this company owns the road network around where you live, they can do what they like! If they decide to ban your old Mini from the roads, just move somewhere else where they don't own the roads".

In other words, it's not a realistic proposition. I'd love to abandon MSN, but I can't without all my friends wondering why I don't talk to them anymore. Of course I could simply not use IM anymore to talk to these people (but as some live abroad it's not practical to phone so really I'd lose them), in much the same way that I could move to another country to avoid a company that bans my car from their roads.

These companies do have monopolies, they have monopolies on my friends IM accounts, and they knew perfectly well when they started giving this stuff away for free that this is what would happen.

I have no problem whatsoever with freeloading on their networks, I didn't want to use them in the first place, and if I need to break into their networks then I will do so (at the same time as trying to convince my friends to use Jabber).

They're cutting their own throats

[vaylen]

Most people have been using Trillian for so long that they will simply ask their friends to use ICQ or MSN so they can stay on their contact lists. In the end this will just result in fewer people using Yahoo messenger.

In a related story, NBC has decided to make their broadcast signal only work on a G.E. television. Brilliant move boys!

Re:why is this even an issue?

[MoonFog]

I mean anyone who uses a proprietary network to do communication on is taking some pretty big chances...
Why is this ? The regular user wouldn't recognize code if I hit him in the head with it. To him it doesn't matter if his chatting protocol is open source or not, he just wants to reach his those on his buddy list.

The lesson to be learned here

[lateralus]

Never trust a corporation with anything you value or at least with proper constraints over that corporation.

If you want to feel safe that you can use your service tomorrow too then run jabber or any other service that you can run a server for if your main server stops.

Serves people right for trusting closed systems.

Well..

[methangel]

I actually prefer the official Windows clients to the all-services-in-one packages. Memory is really not an issue these days either, considering how cheap it is.

But yeah, it's their service that they freely offer, they are logically allowed to control who accesses it. I do not disagree at all.

Re:Well..

[deinol]

Post a:

Memory is really not an issue these days either, considering how cheap it is.

I work at a store that also repairs computers. I can tell you that while memory is cheap, there are a lot of people who are still running older machines. People bring in Pentium I's and II's all the time. Even the occasional 486 shows up. Besides, once you have ICQ, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Kazaa, Weatherbug, Gator, Comet Cursors, Norton Anti-Virus, Mcaffee, Office quick start, Cox quick connect, etc, etc, etc, running, I've seen Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz machines that make a Duran 700Mhz machine look super fast.

Post b:

My client still works fine; it's just too bad if Trillian (whose newest beta version still works, BTW) or some other 3rd party meta-IM client gets boked along with all the spammers.

The point of being able to use Trillian is to have one client for multiple networks. I use Trillian so I don't have to care which network someone is on. I'm on all of them. A single uniform client, with a single interface for each.

I don't worry about losing connectivity to one network for a short while, all the people I really want to talk to have multiple types of accounts as well.

I don't think it's meant as a block.

[typobox43]

I've been watching this situation as it developed... I'm a very.. avid Trillian user. I highly doubt that the sole purpose of this was to block alternative clients. Why would they give a two weeks' warning, when the Trillian developers especially are known for releasing connectivity patches right when the problem occurs? (Remember back when AIM blocked Trillian... February 2002? There were five patched versions of Trillian released within a three-week period. That seems to say that there's not much chance in keeping alternative clients out by simply changing the protocol. I consider the MSN deal a completely different one from the Yahoo issue. MSN has publicly announced that there will be licensing for their protocol - which is great by me. That ensurance that I'm using completely legal software is always a plus. Yahoo, on the other hand, is a different story. They've not really made much comment about alternative IM aside from the "byproduct" comment. They seem to really be avoiding the issue. My theory here is that they decided it was time to upgrade everything... maybe spammers were the driving force, maybe not. Then, someone noticed that it was causing these alternative clients to have fits. Was it a byproduct of their changes? Yes. Was it unwanted? No. I think this was simply a case of "accidental genius."

Yahoo say they're open to talking to 3rd parties

[kikibobo]

Check this story out from new.com.com.

Jumping to the conclusion that their intent is to block 3rd party clients is just wrong, according to this.

It sounds reasonable to occasionally force an upgrade, particularly in the interest of protecting privacy.

Re:GAIM, jabber too?

[kruntiform]

Of course Jabber is not affected. Why would it be? That is the beauty of Jabber and a good reason why everyone should be using it instead of closed IM protocols. (Good luck convincing anyone though!) If you have a Yahoo account which you log-in to from Gaim, though, you might want to clear the auto-login checkbox for that account for the time being as it won't work and it will just give an error. The Gaim people are working on a fix -- you can read the announcement on their web site. I imagine that any Yahoo gateways on Jabber servers would be broken too.

Re:ohh yeh...

[Eric Ass Raymond]

Maybe they want to stop freeloaders who do not contribute to the ad-revenues?

Why the hell do you expect that everything should be free?

Is

[crazy blade]

I really think we should not think sympathetically about this. Consider this metaphor:

Unless you are an AT&T subscriber, you can't call people with AT&T phones.

How is that essentially different? Yet, people would not tolerate the above. Why should they with IM?

Ad Revenue?

[tarnin]

What ads? I use Yim at work and there are zero ads. The only ad that there is is a pop up screen when it starts that can be turned off in the options. No ads on the client itself like aim either. No hacking needed (eg. I'm not running DeadYim).

All this is is an update to their protocal that happened to break third party messengers. I looked for a license that you could purchace ala msn and couldnt find one. I believe that they will continue to allow third party messengers into their network.

Why is it just because they upgrade something and it breaks other programs that they didn't code people call out the wolves on them? Not all companies are M$ here. On the other side, not all companies are Opensource based and fully backwards compaible. In this case, Yahoo upgraded their core protocal and in doing that broke all backwards comptability. This, in my eyes, isn't some evil plot to get people to look at ads or get license money, it's just the way they do things.

Re:Which article did you read?

[NemoX]

This quote really says it all. Kopete and Gaim are already working on a solution. You wont find either of those mentioned in the article, why? Because they don't CHARGE $$$ for people to use someone elses service, like Tillian does. Trillian is nothing but a leech that deserves to be shut down. That is why Microsoft only gave trillian access to its new MSN protocol after Trillian agreed to pay a fee.

I mean seriously, if you had a service you were providing for free/ad-ware, and some company added monthly costs to your bandwidth and cpu usage, and you received no money from them, yet they charged a fairly steep fee, wouldn't you be ticked off too?

BTW, Kopete has already released a fix for MSN, and both (Kopete and Gaim) are working on fixes for MSN and Yahoo! to be released soon.

Re:Why don't these services interconnect?

[ajensen]

If this were the case -- that is, they were interconnected -- I think that they would have a hard time advertising for their other services. For example, when a Yahoo! IM user logs on, Yahoo! has many opportunities to advertise their other services, such as searching, and so on.

The same goes for MSN and AOL. If they were interconnected, they would lose that leverage and lose the ability to draw people to their other (read: more profitable) internet services. People could pick any client they wanted to and still be able to talk to their friends and family. IM by itself is probably not a big money-making venture, so they will want to draw as much from it as possible while investing as little as possible.

As an open-source and standards advocate, I would love to see such an integrated network. However, I look at the business-related consequences for the existing networks, and I sigh... for I doubt we'll see it.

"By Product" my ass

[nurb432]

Its not a by product of their 'upgrading services'.

This IS an effort to block all 'non revenue' clients.

While it IS their network, and they can block whom ever they choose, I can also can choose to boycott all of yahoo! services due to them being a prick, and get everyone i know to also do so.

If they publish the new protocol, then they still get my business. Unlike another IM network who's parent wont be publishing and will work hard to force out all non native clients