11:09 AM

I really have begun to hate IM. More specifically, I’ve come to hate the IM networks - Yahoo, MSN, and AOL.

Why? Because they keep changing their protocols and breaking third-party clients. I’m not going to argue that they don’t have the right to do it - they do - but I don’t have to like that they do it.

See, my company uses AIM. Another company I work with uses Yahoo Messenger. Other companies I’ve worked for have used ICQ, and most of my family uses MSN.

Except, of course, my sister, who uses Jabber, because she’s cool. Jabber doesn’t change. Why? Jabber is an open-source, standardized rock. That’s why.

So to keep up with all of this I use Trillian at work and Gaim at home to connect to all these networks, partly because I don’t want to run 6 different programs for something I don’t even really like, and partly because some of those networks don’t have Linux clients. (C’mon, MSN! You can do it!)

This setup works okay, but not great. I usually don’t have to think about it too much. But every two or three months, somebody does something to fuck it all up. Like Yahoo.

See, in their latest releases they decided to change the login server their service uses from scs.yahoo.com to scs.msg.yahoo.com. They upgraded all their clients and left third-party clients to figure it out on their own. But they didn’t take scs.yahoo.com - they just made it so that it couldn’t communicate with scs.msg.yahoo.com. This meant that for the last week or two, I could see Yahoo users who were using Trillian or Gaim or Fire. But not Yahoo Messenger. Unfortunately, this included all the people who I needed to talk to in the first place, the ones for whom I had legitimate business reasons to IM.

It took me two hours of experimenting last night to figure this out.

Of course, even changing the login server isn’t enough; one has to patch the client, as well.

Thanks, Yahoo. I really fucking appreciate it.

I think my wife has the right idea: only use email, preferably with a mail client that’s at least 15 years old. (She still uses ELM - I’m a heretic - I switched to PINE.)