Yahoo to Trillian: Talk to the hand | CNET News.com
First off, I don't like the way this story was reported. This is not a Trillian only issue. Though that may be the most popular multi-IM program on Windows, there are PLENTY of others. Just look in the open source area. Off the top of my head, you have Gaim, Gossip, Ayttm, Eb-lite, and many many others. I'm not sure if iChat does Yahoo, but if it does, its affected as well.
So, now to the heart of this. Why would a company like Yahoo want to block access to these clients? They claim its because of spam. Well, I personally have never gotten a IM spam since I stopped using ICQ and even those were few and far between.
This just does not seem like a smart move on their part. They claim they are going to continue to change their protocol as often as possible to keep clients from coming up with work-arounds. So, basically, anyone who does not want to run the official client is out of Yahoo for good. Well, what to do? Screw em! There are plenty of other IM networks out there, AIM, ICQ (which is sorta AIM these days), MSN, Jabber, etc etc. I would much rather use a network that is going to allow me to use any client I want than get stuck using a crappy client. I already have enough running on my desktop that the last thing I need is ANOTHER program to communicate with my friends. I'll just yell at the few people I know who are ONLY on yahoo and tell em to get AIM accounts if they want to talk to me. Seems to me (at least from my list) that AIM is the dominant protocol anyways, so making this change just makes Yahoo look even less attractive to use.
ChipX86 says Gaim already has a workaround in the works, but its limited in that you can't add and remove buddies. And with Yahoo's policy as stated in the article, it will probably only work for a limited time anyways.
