Yahoo Restored in Some IM Clients

Sparks23 writes "Third-party instant messaging clients have begun to reconnect to Yahoo. While the authorization scheme has not been completely decoded -- expect some bumps -- Gaim and Trillian have both partially restored connectivity. Gaim has the new authorization scheme in CVS and their new 0.70 release, and Cerulean has made a beta patch available for Trillian Pro 2.0; consider both patches 'beta' for the moment."

Comments

Independent IM Client Futures

[sjvn]

Much as I like both GAIM and Trillian, sooner or later, probably by some kind of hard wired authenication/security mechanism, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsft will manage to block these clients often enough and for long enough that they'll lose their utility.

Looking down the road, I think the only hope for open clients are open IM servers, probably, IMHO, based on Jabber.

Steven

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[self assembled struc]

Man, have you ever used Jabber?

At my current job we use Jabber internally to talk to each other so we don't have to send passwords and the like out over the internet, and use encryption it as well. Jabber is probably the biggest pain the ass to set up and administer and still not all of the clients support enough of the feature set (not even the daemons do) for it to be useful.

Not saying that it's any better than some of it's competition. At my last job (employer shall remain nameless, but let's say it's Gimbles to Yahoo's Macys and is owned a Spanish company) I was on the team implementing the new IM launch. (yeah! IM in 2003! Let's clean up that market share with our reach. Oh wait. Damn.) It was (is) based on IBM/Lotus' IM implementation (sadly the name escapes me right now) which was just as much of a pain in the ass. At least with Jabber you can view all the databases, files, etc...

Still, I really doubt jabber will ever gain the critial mass it needs to be the IM software of choice. Not until a company oike AOL, Yahoo! or MS picks it up and starts using it. And that's as likely as Lycos overtaking Yahoo! in the search market by aquiring Google.

Re:Cooperation

[Anonymous Coward]

> For those of you who don't RTFA

There is no FA, jackass

Why bother?

[stratjakt]

Why don't we all just say screw these proprietary IM clients.

If all your non-techie friends know that they cant contact you for free tech support over MSN or Yahoo, they wont use it.

Let them die due to lack of use, or at least cripple 'em. Don't legitimize that kind of dogshit.

Re:Everyone wants to win

[Honest Man]

Am I? "... interested in talking ..." is a polite way of saying.. 'sure, we'll let them use our protocol.....for a price'....and if they really wanted others running on their protocol they'd have made some effort to post a 'change of protocol' information out so the alternative IM companies didn't have to run sniffers to figure out what changed... If they had, we would not have been in yahoo-limbo, now would we.

Stop believing everything you read. Sheesh.

Yahoo plans to release source

[GillBates0]

Everybody bickering about Yahoo trying to kill of "competing" clients, RTFA, and take note of this:

Yahoo has been trying to help the other Y! messenger clients update their code to work with the new protocol....they're NOT trying to kill them off.

I'm particularly happy to see this move, because Yahoo is about the only big corporation which is working on Unix versions of their client. Yahoo has Solaris, BSD, and Linux versions of the messenger. Moreover, from http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ymessenger/ mailing list they're ACTUALLY speculating on releasing their source code for their UNIX clients:

Subject: New poll for ymessenger

Enter your vote today! A new poll has been created for the ymessenger group:

Would you like to have access to Yahoo Messenger Sources?

o Yes
o No
o Why should I?

To vote, please visit the following web page:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ymessenger/surveys ?i d=11283317

Note: Please do not reply to this message. Poll votes are not collected via email. To vote, you must go to the Yahoo! Groups web site listed above.

Thanks!

Re:Nobody uses Yahoo! Messenger

[pirhana]

I guess you are from US. Yahoo messenger(or even msn) wouldnt be very popular there. But thats not the case in other parts of world. Where I know(India and now Middle east) yahoo and msn are extremely popular and AIM is virtually absent. And regarding your comment on not using yahoo, its a fine idea but not practical IMHO . Because people use it and if you need to chat with them, you have to use it(or something like gaim which speaks that protocol). Also, I dont think yahoo protocol is inferior comparing to msn and all. It has some cool features like offline messaging and "invisible mode" which seems to be absent in others (atleast msn, I dont know about AIM).

Want Telecom Deregulated?

[GoodNicsTken]

Think about this for a minute. Everyone agrees the current telecom inter-carrier payment system is a mess and needs an overhaul. However, IM is a perfect example of what would happen witout such systems in place.

We would have a bunch of independent companies refusing to talk to each other, forcing you buy thier phones (remember thoes days?), and not completeing calls between different companies. I'm a Trillian user, but I side with the IM provides on this one.

We need a good reliable, easy to use, open source, P2P IM network, then we can do away with all the nonsense.

Copy protection - One more reason for me to find a perfectly functional copy on the Internet.