Yahoo vs. Trillian

Yahoo has begun blocking Cerulean Studios' Trillian software from communicating with its own instant messaging software as part of its plan to limit third parties from piggybacking on its service.

On Thursday, some Trillian users began reporting an inability to communicate with their Yahoo Messenger contacts. A Yahoo spokeswoman on Friday morning confirmed that Trillian users' inability to access Yahoo Messenger was the result of recent policies put in place by the Web giant.

Yahoo last week announced that it would require people who use older versions of Yahoo Messenger to upgrade to more recent versions. Coinciding with the upgrade, Yahoo said it would likely disable access to outside IM services such as Trillian. Yahoo set a deadline of Wednesday for its forced upgrade and its intention to disconnect Trillian.

"If this has affected the way in which third parties interact with our service, it is merely a byproduct of our efforts to implement preventative measures to protect our users from potential spammers," Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako said.

A notice posted on Trillian's Web site informed users about "an issue that may cause a crash or invalid password when trying to autoconnect to Yahoo," the site read. Trillian users who reported the problem said they were unable to view their buddy lists when connecting to Yahoo.

"We are aware of the current connectivity issues with Trillian and the Yahoo network, brought on as a result of Yahoo's recent protocol upgrade," Scott Werndorfer, co-founder of Cerulean, said in an e-mail statement. "We are working hard on a solution and will update our Web site when more information becomes available."

Trillian software, produced by privately held, Connecticut-based Cerulean, allows people to combine various IM clients into one interface. Users can view buddy lists from various services, such as AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger, and exchange IM text messages with them.

The popularity of Trillian has risen, largely because popular IM services do not communicate with each other. As a result, people use different IM services simultaneously on their PCs to communicate with contacts who reside in different communities. These closed networks have helped incumbent leader AOL maintain its large market share while allowing rivals MSN and Yahoo to flourish alongside it.

What separates the Big Three IM services are features. AOL, MSN and Yahoo services each have distinct flavors and rely on these distinctions to maintain user loyalty. Trillian strips all clients of their differences and allows people to exchange IMs through its own look and feel.

A day after last week's Yahoo announcement, Trillian released software patches that were aimed at allowing it to continue accessing Yahoo and MSN buddy lists. But as of this week, those patches do not appear to be working.

Source(http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5082812.html)

good for yahoo, that's just a few thousand (possibly million) users they just lost. although this seems to be popular with the large companies. to get rid of the large mass of non-profitable users.

THat has been going back and forth between Trillian and all the others for years now. I went a long time last year without access to AOL or was it MSN??? I forget now.

It sucks. What happened to that open IM project/standard?

I know ICQ doesn't work on Trillian

ICQ worked fine on trillian 2.0 for me yesterday.

It must just be the older versions. I would get an error everythime i tried to logon w/ ICQ

Thats pretty stupid of them to do. What exactly does Yahoo, or MSN get from blocking Trillion connections. The only reason I ever used Yahoo or MSN was BECAUSE of Trillion. Also, somone else posted an article that MSN may start to charge for their "freemail" and chat services. The internet is being changed a lot in very negative ways by coperate greed. It will continue, but I do hope someone stops it. I dought M$ or Yahoo would listen to petitions. :-/

Hmm well it would be a great thing if Yahoo! decided to fix some bugs in their client aswell.. I have two issues with mine:

-under WinXP it takes over the CPU and inhibits all other processes
-under RedHat I cannot read the characters.. they all have these boxes around them...

As for the issue concerned... I guess it's Yahoo!'s right to do so anyway, but as said they lost a lot of users...

Well, it's not just Trillian. I've found recently that Centericq can no longer connect to Yahoo (as of version 4.9.4 -- I haven't upgraded yet). I get the error that my "client" is too "old" (go figure).

It's no different than when AOL tried (keyword) to block Trillian users from connecting through their servers. It didn't work. The coding team of 2 at Trillian stomped a mudhole through all of AOL's attempted *fixes* and what happened was AOL eventually gave up and just accepted it. The same thing will happen with Yahoo. If not, there goes my yahoo account. I refuse to be force-fed a particular software program simply because of their refusal to work with other programs.

Because of their refusal to have other companies using their programs... ok it's tight on the consumer but they are well within their rights to do it.

Icq is my main instant messanger client. As many other AO users have stated the primary reason that I use yahoo, and AOL for that matter is because i have a convienent interface that combines them all into one. I'd much rather get rid of my yahoo account than get rid of trillian.

ICQ does work with trillian, i've used it since WAY back in the early days of trillian. However if your contacts are using older ICQ software it appears to be finicky on some of the users. I've got messages from trillian before saying something along the lines that "the user may be using an older version of icq". Anyways I think that by yahoo blocking users from 3rd party software they will lose alot of users, maybe they don't care anyway eh?

Is there a client similar to Trillion, or DeadAIM for Linux? Also, does Trillion or DeadAIM include an Aliasing feature like GAIM?

Personally I hate Trillian. They use services set up by other companies and then bitch when the other companies turn off their access. Yahoo doesn't charge you to use YIM, AOL doesn't charge you to use AIM. So don't start talking **** about non-profit organizations. And Cerillian is NOT a non-profit... they charge you to use Trillian Pro. So they make money off leaching off servers that other people set up. Now maybe if they had their own IM stuff, it wouldn't be as bad, but they still make money off of the fact that they are using other peoples services and all they have to do is modify a little bit of code.

They do have their own AIM stuff. I remember setting up a Trillian account. In fact you have to have valid accounts with all the other services anyway and trillian only offers scaled down access abilities anyway. The one thing I do like about that, is you don't have to download all the IM clients. I do agree with Soulman on the leeching part. If I was a security admin over at Yahoo I would be pissed that someone was connecting to my system without the client I intended them to use. They will keep trying to block 3rd party clients and eventually they will get around to encrypting them and alienating them more or (I hope) reach some kind of open standard.

I haven't seen Jabber mentioned in this post so far. For those of you who are not familiar with the jabber protocol it is a open-source IM client. There are a lot of free servers and alot of free clients for both windows and *nix. ( http://www.jabber.org/ ).

Jabber has what it calls "transports" that tie into msn, yahoo, Icq (and other, but those are the only transports I've personally tried)

Another great thing about jabber is that it allows for SSL connections for secure communications. I've also read that it supports pgp, but as of yet, I have not tried to get pgp working yet.

There are various free and/or commercial cients and also many free/commercial servers, so you can set up your own IM server, tie it to the big 3, and have no/almost no out of pocket cost.

So if you like trillian because it allows you to tie multiple im clients together, I would advise that you try one of the jabber clients. As of right now, my jabber client is working fine with MSN and Yahoo.

Hope this info helps someone. =)

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Originally posted here by souleman
Personally I hate Trillian. They use services set up by other companies and then bitch when the other companies turn off their access. Yahoo doesn't charge you to use YIM, AOL doesn't charge you to use AIM. So don't start talking **** about non-profit organizations. And Cerillian is NOT a non-profit... they charge you to use Trillian Pro. So they make money off leaching off servers that other people set up. Now maybe if they had their own IM stuff, it wouldn't be as bad, but they still make money off of the fact that they are using other peoples services and all they have to do is modify a little bit of code.

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I have to disagree with this statement simply because of a few things. First, Cerulean Studios has *never* made a funtional-delimited version of Trillian, forcing users to buy the "pro" or "full" version. They've been not-for-profit ever since pre-beta and only took donations. Now if you donated, that would go into your user account database and when the Pro v1.0 came out, you were able to download it for free because you've already "supported" them. Trillian happens to be one of the more popular "all-in-one" programs that are out there. They're definitely no different than GAIM or others that use authentication servers that AOL hosts/owns/etc. Also, compare the number of Pro users versus the number of freeloaders out there that constantly insist on using "freeware" and never support anything. The reason I would rather support Trillian is because I can use a number of clients then, instead of being forced to use yet another IM client that has ads, stock option tickers, and a plethora of other crappy things I can't turn off. So personally, I hate AOL, Yahoo, and MSN for their methods of trying to force people to use *their* software.

I never said they "forced" you to buy the pro version. I said that there was a difference between Basic and Pro versions. And they charge for the pro version....

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Trillian Pro costs $25.00 USD and includes a year of free upgrades and technical support

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That isn't about a donation, that is a purchace. You will also notice that the Pro version has already been patched to work with Yahoo, yet the other versions patches will be "released soon". Its like Redhat. You don't have to buy the product, but if you want cutomer support and early releases, you pay for it. At least redhat doesn't leach off other companies. Unless I am wrong, GAIM and jabber and things like that are totally free. That is non-profit. Cerulean is trying to make money off of this. So if they are making money, then they should be purchasing access to YIM, AIM, ICQ, whatever. And yes, you can use the Basic version, so its not like mIRC where you can only use it for a set time, but the PRO version does have a lot more functions to it.

In all actuallity, I am surprised they haven't found a way to use the Patriot Act against them. I think that would be going way overboard as there are no signs of terrorism, but the point is, they are still using unauthorized access to the different IM systems.

Cerulean Studios has released a software patch that will let a version of its Trillian instant-messaging service communicate with Yahoo Messenger, according to its co-founder.

The patch, called Yahoo Patch Beta 1 applies only to Trillian Pro, the paid version of Cerulean's popular IM client. The company said it plans to offer patches for the older 1.0 version and its free 0.74 software, though it hasn't said when it will do so.

"A patch to resolve the recent Yahoo connectivity issue is currently undergoing beta testing," Cerulean co-founder Scott Werndorfer wrote in an e-mail message. "Once we are confident that the patch is functioning 100 percent, we will update the rest of our product lines."

A Yahoo representative declined to comment.

The software update to Trillian Pro was released days after Yahoo blocked the third-party client from accessing its IM "buddy" lists. Yahoo announced earlier this month that it would require consumers to upgrade to more recent versions of Yahoo Messenger in an effort to stem spam. The Web portal also said it would probably disable access to outside IM providers such as Trillian.

Trillian allows people to combine their chat buddies from various IM services into one master list. IM services such as Yahoo, MSN Messenger and America Online's Instant Messenger lose their distinct features when integrated into Trillian, because it gives them a common look and feel.

The ongoing skirmish between Yahoo and Trillian mirrors earlier conflicts between AOL and Microsoft.

In July 1999, AOL and Microsoft engaged in a similar cat-and-mouse game when MSN Messenger launched with the ability to communicate directly with AIM users. AOL considered the move akin to a hack into its network and blocked MSN from tapping its customers. MSN released software to regain interoperability only to be blocked again by AOL hours later.

Yahoo is not alone in plans to shut out Trillian. In August, Microsoft announced that consumers must upgrade to newer MSN software. Like Yahoo, the software giant said it would likely block out third-party IM services such as Trillian as part of the upgrade.

source(http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5083623.html?tag=lh)

On a side note, I notices today that AIM now accepts my digital certificate I use for encrypted email. Interesting. I can now easily encrypt my AIM sessions.

I agree with vorlin that people should not have to be "force-fed a paticular software program", and yahoo will lose more than a few users. Though I would pick yahoo over trillian anyday...with all of trillian's downfalls, bugs, vulnerabilities, and all of the system resources it eats up. I do how ever feel that it is a very good idea for someone to design a program like trillian that incorporates all of the various instant messaging programs, because there is no reason to have a million different programs that all have different downfalls, but all do mostly the same thing.


berg

It's not just Yahoo, either. Microsoft just released a new version of MSN Messenger and is forcing users to update before using it. Should you decide not to update, it quits the program for you.

Problem is, administrative priveliges are required to install the newer version of MSN, preventing anyone from running it on my college network. The network admins are ecstatic about this, as most people here seem to be on MSN, which they say was eating about 20% of the school bandwidth.

As for an instant messenger client, I personally use Miranda IM, available at www.sourceforge.net, which does not require installation of any kind. Although it is still buggy, I have had no problem getting it to work with my system and/or my firewall and have successfully transferred files to AIM, MSN, ICQ, and Yahoo! users. Miranda no longer functions from college desktops, as they have now closed the ports required to use it, blaming the problem on Microsoft. :mad: (sorry, just venting)

Since the newer version of MSN Messenger requires admin priveleges to install, I am inclined to believe that it is used for more effective data mining by intercepting communications before they are sent to the OS. The only reason I can see for the requirement of admin priveleges would be to install a service which would circumvent security safeguards present in lower access accounts. Although 'intercepting communications' sounds a little on the paranoid side, I am not worried they are spying. However, they may be using the program to get a closer look at spyware installed on your system. Worse has been done by more reputable companies.

I feel I must comment on the practice of freeloading a messenger service from other servers. They are deliberately using bandwidth provided by 3rd parties, which costs everyone money except them. I cannot blame the major IM providers for attempting to limit or prevent thier use. The argument against this philosophy is that these people would be using this bandwidth anyway with a propiertary client, and are now using it simply with a different interface. However, these IM providers rely on thier products to make them money, through data mining and links provided at download time, among others. They cannot do this with 3rd party clients unless an agreement is in place. There is not.

They are incorporating MSM into the operating system. That is why it may require admin priveledges. It's probably trying to modify your registry.

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Originally posted here by Striek
It's not just Yahoo, either. Microsoft just released a new version of MSN Messenger and is forcing users to update before using it. Should you decide not to update, it quits the program for you.

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o.O eh? I've had no such problem.... I'm running 6.0 and it's quite happy with it... no updates or anything.

You don't mean upgrading to 6.0 from a < 6 version do you? In which case there are reasons. The new versions (post 6.0) planned may be incompatible with previous versions due to the new features they are added.

I got so annoyed with that Yahoo crap. Cerulean better patch it quick, because everytime i connect, it closes. I might just Download GAIM tonight and see how that works.