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Yahoo! Opens up Their Instant Messenger
prostoalex writes "Reuters is reporting on the new release of Yahoo! Messenger, which will allow third-party applications and plugins to run within the Messenger environment. From the article: 'Initial partners include 30 Boxes, a calendar-sharing site that competes with Google Calendar, commodities trading site Hedgestreet.com and Pando.com, which offers a service for sharing videos or other files via BitTorrent technology. More than 100 mini-programs will be available initially.' The application is currently available in beta. Relatedly, Microsoft is removing the beta warning label from Windows Live Messenger and promises better voice communications, landline calls and future integration with Yahoo! Messenger."
I'm wondering... Will they make it so that ANY of this runs on Linux? If not, why should I care?
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Yes, I do - young people. Based on your ID, I'd guess you don't fit into that demographic (but I could be wrong).
These IM clients have morphed into horribly bloated slow, cranky fragile pieces of junk. Just what we need - an MS lab project that they magically took the 'beta' tag off even though its the same junk as last week - to compete in the same space as all the other junk.
I think it's mostly attributed to the lack of computer literate individuals that these applications are targetted to; They want to bring something old but too complicated to use to them, and pass it off as something fresh.
The above is most likely humour. Slashdot foot icon goes here.
Not that I don't find that comment funny, but I'm curious why AOL adopting a 3rd party addon model is seen as a security hazard (I'd wager a decent chunk of /. feels that way - could be wrong) whereas Firefox is considered a secure browser.
Then again, it is AOL.
I can see an analogy here. Mobile phones and IM-applications (both primarily communications tools) are turning into multi-purpose things. Perhaps there really is a demand.
Security vulnerablities = bugs. These are avoided at all cost, and hard to spot. Malicious code is a different cup of tea. Should be much easier to spot and result in immediate reporting of the malicious extension. Even if one in a thousand of users takes a peek at the source, that's enough to prevent malicious pieces of code from executing.
Additionally, a browser uses a "pull" method to get data: User requests data, gets response. May visit a site with malicious extension and the site may try to trick them into installing it, once visited, but no visit - no risk. IM uses "push-pull", with the "push" part more dangerous - the IM is listening and reacts to incoming requests from outside, the malicious code can contact everyone on contact list and send itself to vulnerable clients, no action on side of the user may be required. A browser vulnerablity will infect users visiting given site using vulnerable browser. A IM vulnerablity will infect all on-line users of the IM.
Of course these are just qualitative differences - IM idea is simply more dangerous than browser one, but both can be vulnerable. And there's a matter of user base. Users of AOL are most likely to install a program a friend from their contact list suggests them to install.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
With Koepete and Gaim both very robust messengers, I'm not sure why you need to keep Windows just for Yahoo Messenger.
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Damn, When I read that heading I thought maybe yahoo was going to open up their messager protocal.
This doesn't even deserve to involve the word 'open'. But it can use the word 'API'
...and that is all I have to say about that.
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Yahoo! is so far behind in the IM market that they shouldn't even bother. Not to mention their client sucks, of course.
It's difficult to imagine a web browser plugin that could harass millions of other web browser users as easily as an instant messenger client plugin could harass millions of other instant messenger users.
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