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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."
For those of you who don't RTFA.....Cerulean studios actually *sent* the GAIM folk the protocol. This is a good example of how Yahoo is actually fostering a good relationship between "competing" clients. [Competing in the sense that they are both alternative...] Kind of nice to see that kind of collaboration....
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
Yahoo just wants to be the exclusive program for their IM network... While they may have the right to do that, it's a huge mistake... I have no intention of installing 4 different IM clients on my pc - if they don't want me to use their services, then I wont....
A few days ago, I was using Trillian until it started crashing at login every time. A few news articles later informed me that Yahoo's tweaks were to blame.
Frustrated, I did a quick search for other third-party clients and found Easy Message. It's small, not very customizable, but it does the job and connects to my Yahoo account with (as far as I can tell) no problems.
Very strange. But to be honest, I didn't like Trillian as much as I wanted to anyway.
From the new protocol, can anyone gather what and more importantly why Yahoo changed? Was it security reasons? Or was it simply to lock other clients out?
I see one of two things happening:
- The companies of the top IM clients will start making it impossible (for sure this time) to piggy back without their official client
- They will keep doing what they have been doing in smaller incriments to create a developer maintenance nightmare to support the protocol.
- Third I have listed anyway: the companies will cooperate and help provide information on how to support the protocol (yeah right, this doesn't make money and that's what they're after first and foremost)
I only hope that there is a single open source IM protocol that everyone will use and that is scalable above and beyond the current IM clients/protocols. *cough*jabber*cough*
[[ the only 15 letter word that is spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable: it may soon be, however. ]]
"It's only fair that we get to use their protocol".
Surely the debate has little if anything to do with the protocol, it has everything to do with Yahoo's server base that sits behind their IM client and the business model that they have in place that sustains those servers.
Sure, we all have a right to use the protocol, it's only bits and bytes and does not cost anybody anything. Who gives us the right to use their servers though?
As much as I respect the Trillian and Gaim developers for adapting their clients on such short notice, I think they've got the wrong approach to the whole IM thing. For now, the two groups (or group and company I guess) are integrating IM clients into a single program with a clean interface. Many of us love the idea, and use their two clients, but this isn't fixing the underlying problems which allow MS and Yahoo to cause havoc by modifying their proprietary protocols. What Gaim and Trillian need to do is integrate users.
The main instant messaging protocols are already supported, namely Yahoo, AIM, MSN and ICQ. The problem, which has been addressed a ton of times on /., is that users go to the IM network that their friends are on, and so all four networks (with ICQ trailing) have significant user bases. But this can change if Gaim and Trillian get a bit creative. Simply put, add an open source protocol to the mix of supported protocols (Jabber) and let the rest work itself out.
What I think would happen is that Gaim and Trillian users would use Jabber to talk to each other, and use the commercial protocols to talk to the rest of their friends. As time goes on, these other friends could be migrated to Trillian or Gaim, maintaining contact with their MSN/AIM/etc buddies while now speaking Jabber to their Trillian and Gaim friends. This could be repeated indefinitely, and as Gaim and Trillian's user bases grow over time, there would be no reason to use commercial protocols because most people would already speak Jabber, courtesy of Gaim and Trillian supporting it.
In short, I believe Gaim and Trillian could serve as middlemen in switching users over to open source protocols like Jabber. The clients' ability to speak a multitude of protocols can bridge the gap between those pushing forward to open source protocols and those retaining backwards compatibility to their commercial protocol speaking friends.
*blinking cursor*
FYI: Trillian 2.0 Pro tries to authenticate the user over the internet and refuses to work if it cannot contact the Cerulean Studios servers.
This misfeature originally appeared in the beta and we (the users) were led to believe (in the forums) that it will not make it into the final release. Guess what, it did.
This creates problems with users behind corporate firewalls, those running local servers on intranets, etc. It makes Trillian vulnerable to DOS attacks on a single source and in general is a pain (for example, on my machine it starts and tries to connect before the SW firewall finishes loading).
While "patches" for this behaviour are widely available (no, I will not link to one, use your favourite "crack search" site then contemplate the fallacy of "copy protection"), I see it more as a trust issue.
Cerulean Studios doesn't trust me (a paying customer) and, after that stunt, I have a hard time trusting them.
Therefore, I am no longer recommending Trillian to anyone. Rather, I urge people to look at the available alternatives (Gaim, Easy Message, AYTTM and others).
Hmmm... Can anyone take it upon themselves to compile a comparison between the available multiprotocol IM clients?
Tell me about it. I went traipsing about the globe recently, and AIM was on maybe one computer that I saw (and someone probably installed it there themselves). Yahoo was much, much more prevalent. This was in New Zealand & Australia, South Africa, and some bits of Europe.
As an unrelated aside, most annoying were internet cafes that didn't have any of them installed, and only had computers that let you web browse. You couldn't even open a regular telnet prompt on them. I'd heard rumors of a web-based Yahoo client or something, but figured even if it existed it'd require machine permissions those "web browser only" machines wouldn't have.