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Yahoo Changes Protocol, Blocks Third Party Clients
NaDrew writes "ZDNet reports that Yahoo is once again blocking connections from Trillian (the alternative multi-protocol client). Yahoo tried this a few times last year and it looks like they're trying again. Cerulean, maker of Trillian, employs some excellent protocol engineers, who I have no doubt will quickly figure out Yahoo's latest obfuscation and release a patch. A quick fix discovered late this evening: Change your Y!IM host from scs.msg.yahoo.com to scs.yahoo.com, port 5050, and it should work. This is on Trillian 0.74H, not Pro."
Well, does anyone know if this is just a protocol upgrade or if yahoo! is really trying to get rid of the third party clients?
If they want to get rid of 3rd party clients, then this is just another arms race, meaning we will eventually have open clients that work, after some finite delay.
In all honesty I can't blame yahoo! for trying. After all, for each person that doesn't see the ads associated with their official client, they lose revenue.
Yahoo! is a great site and they provide a LOT of stuff for free, so I don't blame them for trying to get some money back for all the free stuff they have given us over the years. I guess since IMing is so popular and so much time is spent in the IM client, to them that's a LOT of missing eyeballs over a long period of time that don't get to see the ads. That's a lot of money lost by the minute. And let's face it.. we are using their computers for free, and not giving anything back each time we use a third party client.
My question though, is that if they hate third party IM clients for cutting into their rev. stream, why don't they take the law out of their own hands and use the law to their advantage? Is there nothing that could be done, by drafting some clever EULA or something, that would make it illegal or something like that to use 3rd party clients? That might actually dampen the efforts with libyahoo and other projects that try to develop an open protocol lib. Sourceforge might even cease to host such projects, being that they are in the realm of piracy or accorting to the DMCA.
While it would suck for me (as I love to use centericq over their stupid client), why don't they just make it illegal to use third party clients?
For the same reason the tech community comes out with patches for holes in programs, why we come out with virus protection, etc.... To try and stop people from doing what we do not want them to do. It may not be permenant, but it will work
Now my question, didn't the gov't come out with a law a while ago forcing AOL to share their IM standards so third party software could integrate with it? And if so, wouldn't this apply to all IM software, including Yahoo?
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
In an era where instant messaging is touting as the "next big thing", most service providers are always faced with the dilemma of whether to allow third party clients to connect, or prevent.
Messaging clients with advertisement-based model will surely object to allowing third party clients to connect, since it doesnt make any business sense.
Furthermore, they may have allowed such third party clients in the past, to gain that critical mass that ensures market peneration and continued usage, but once they are past the bell curve, they would then clam down on it.
Think of it as an equivalent to Microsoft clamping down on piracy - they never prevented that in the past knowing that so long as its their products being used, they will be able to generate revenues one way or the other. Now that the market penetration is coming to a saturation (or if not, there are far more alternative solutions available than ever before), they have started to really put on the squeeze.
Finally, companies like trillian may well have the best protocol engineers in the world, but such disruptions in service shall push away customers every time, however small the percentage might be. Unless connectivity to widely used messengers is provided by agreement, such connectivity outages will cause most users to move to move away from them.
http://efil.blogspot.com/
Is this article supposed to make Yahoo look evil? If so, I don't see how. I know the popular notion on /. that "information wants to be free", but Yahoo provides a free service, and as with a free service, you are at the mercy of the provider. So Yahoo wants you to use their official client, it isn't the end of the world, nor do I think it is even newsworthy here on /. I am prepared for the inevitable karma loss on this comment, but I have been maxed out for years, it does not bother me anymore.
I hate sigs.
Some of the clients are just too big. My family uses Yahoo on their PCs. I have a 12" PowerBook and the Yahoo Messenger client for OS X takes up a good 10+% of the screen. Adium, on the other hand, takes up about 10% of the space that Yahoo Messenger does so I can leave it always visible in the corner of the screen. For me it has nothing to do with ads and everything to do with customization for my needs.
Protocol: Jabber. Best client for it? hard to say, but my favorite is Psi. And I'm working on spreading the word to everybody that I can.
GPL made simple: What was my stuff is now our stuff. If you improve our stuff, please keep it our stuff.
"3rd party clients cut out a potential source of revenue for Yahoo"
Actually, 3rd party clients are the ONLY way they receive revenue from some of us. I keep a Yahoo and Hotmail email account. I rarely IM anyone outside of AIM. Trillian's checking of Yahoo email drives me to their site (where I see their ads). No checking, I don't go as often to check my mail. They lose money. As far as I'm concerned, Yahoo is shooting themselves in the foot.
my specific situation wont apply to everyone, but...
I was using trillian until I figured out that all my contacts were on all the four major instant messagers... then I consolidated all my contacts into just one IM client.
Many of my fellow posters have suggested that the solution is for people to switch to Jabber. I agree that the solution should start with Jabber, but it's not as easy as asking everyone to please switch.
I'm going to try to identify the obstacles to a migration to open standards, and I hope that others will expand on this and maybe even offer some solutions.
How do you convince ISPs to begin deploying Jabber servers as they would deploy mail servers? Is there any money to be made in deploying and operating a worldwide network of Jabber servers? If so, maybe some entrepreneur could come up with a clever idea for bootstrapping the network.
As some people have mentioned, it is possible that IM may evolve interoperability naturally, but I wouldn't count on that happening anytime soon. The final weapon of the proprietary IM providers will be to add crypto authentication to the protocol, with a key embedded into the clients. They would then have a solid legal recourse (DMCA) against "rogue" clients seeking interoperability. (Who knows, though... that could be a useful selling point for open standards!)
There... now that I've identified the problems, all that's left is for someone to provide the solutions. ;)