Yahoo Messenger Blocking youtube.com URLs?

wesleyye writes, "This morning I attempted to copy and paste a youtube.com URL to two of my friends via Yahoo IM. But they kept complaining they did not see anything. Actually they saw all the text message lines except the line with the youtube URL. Is YIM blocking the competitor out?" We verified in this office that a fully formed youtube.com URL could not be passed on YIM; changing the URL to read youtubex.com caused it to go through. Any other URL we tried worked. Update 10/10/2006 20:58 GMT by SM: Additional testing shows that there is something else going on for well formatted URLs. Even search results from search.yahoo.com had trouble when included with other text on the same line. Still awaiting comment from Yahoo!.

Comments

Blocked by the client software

[Mwongozi]

Just tested this with a friend - the URLs get through fine when sent with Adium. So they're being blocked by the client software - not the network itself.

They've done this before

[Jugalator]

Since they've done this before, and now done it again, I assume they'll keep doing it until discovered with it in the act. In which case they'll call it a temporary glitch or something. They're skilled in this work internationally too, and are building quite a reputation with all this.