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

That's great for Google!

[KingSkippus]

Before everyone gets to feeling sorry for Google for this grave injustice against them, you should realize that Yahoo is well within their rights to block anything they want to from going through their IM service, and once people figure out that it's broken as a result, they'll start using an alternative.

...like, say, Google talk, maybe?

Re:That's great for Google!

[IANAAC]

My friend attempted to submit this MONTHS ago and it was rejected.

Have your friend start a blog, then post the "article" to slashdot anonymously. Seems to regularly work.

here's what happened

[porkThreeWays]

(yahoo guy in the back browsing slashdot at work)

Shit! *click* Whew.

Can't imagine they'd want to.

[Kadin2048]

Very strange.

I just did some Googling and there doesn't seem to be anyone else talking about it, at least that I could find -- if Yahoo really was engaging in this, you'd think it would have created more of a hue and cry.

I'm starting to suspect hoax, unless someone besides the article submitter can come up with evidence that it happened.

I can't imagine that Yahoo would want to demonstrate that it has the capability of selectively filtering messages based on content. That just opens the door to lots of problematic demands -- e.g., why don't they block links to warez sites, or porn, or gambling, or (in other countries) various political websites. If you have that sort of capability, even if you don't want to use it for evil purposes, people are going to try and make you use it. So it's better just to never develop the capability in the first place, and if it is technically possible, never reveal that it can be done on demand, so that you can maintain your plausible deniability.

Re:Can't imagine they'd want to.

[joe_bruin]

Yahoo filters out certain messages, and it has nothing to do with YouTube. Near as I can figure, the algorithm is like this:

If the first message you send to someone in a period of time contains only a URL (doesn't matter where it links to), it will be filtered out. I'm guessing this is to reduce spam.

Way to overreact, Slashdot.

Re:Can't imagine they'd want to.

[Firehed]

You could always post a screenshot of the logs, since that seems to be admissable in court nowadays.

Re:Politics?

[timster]

I think it's partially intended as a hint about what a future without network neutrality might be like.

Not just YouTube...

[g_attrill]

I have recently noticed that many URLs sent in IM's will disappear without a trace. It seems that often the FIRST URL sent will not get through, but subsequent ones will. For example I will open an IM window, send a URL then say "did you get that?" after they don't reply, then the person will reply "did I get what?". The ones I can recall where links to Photobucket.

I think they are basically trying to stop the IM spam where URLs are randomly sent to users.

This is apparently an old, old bug.

[shark72]

Sending URLs of any sort as Yahoo! IMs has been unreliable for me and my friends for at least a year. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it; some URLs just don't go through. I've noticed it when both parties are using Yahoo! Messenger and also when one or both parties are using Adium, so unless the bug also exists within Adium, it may be a server-side issue.

I've found that preceeding the URL with some random text (I end up typing "click here:" or something similar) addresses the issue. It's only when the IM line consists solely of a URL that it randomly goes into the bit bucket.