Yahoo to Trillian: Talk to the hand - News - ZDNet
0 commentsYahoo to Trillian: Talk to the hand via Jonathan Speigner's Blog
Yahoo on Wednesday began blocking Cerulean Studios' Trillian software from communicating with its instant messaging service in its latest step to fence its popular client from third-party integrators.
Will other networks follow suit? Trillian makes money from pirating instant messenger services such as Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ and MSN. Part of me is glad to see 
fighting them off - I own some YHOO
, and so Trillian users have been getting a free ride at my expense.
When Trillian faced AOL for a similar access battle in 2002, much of the tech press cried foul.
Does Trillian meet a need? Certainly. I'd love to have a single client... But it's not up to parasites like Trillian to make this possible.
It's true that progress toward such interoperability...moves at a pace somewhere between glacial and tectonic. And I can think of business reasons...for services like AOL to shun working relationships with MSN, Yahoo, and others.
But that doesn't take away from the real issue: AOL's control of its own network. At the end of all this, if AOL doesn't want Trillian on its network, then Trillian should take the hint and just go away. David Coursey, ZDNet US
My senior software slash entrepreneurship project, BuddyGopher, is always at risk of getting shuttered from AOL's network. And so the other side of me is a little concerned. What if AOL follows suit to try blocking such pirate clients from accessing their proprietary network again? (Eventually they gave up trying to lock Trillian out.)
Luckily, BuddyGopher plays very nice with AOL's network. We consider our software to be a feature for AOL's official client. It was very important to me that BuddyGopher would only work with AOL's official client release (and not Trillian or GAIM) to encourage advertising impressions for AOL. We're not about to bite the hand that feeds us.