Say Bye To Chat 2.0
Yahoo! likes to keep developers on their toes. Last year I wrote a YCHT protocol bridge for my application so you could use YCHT protocol through Yahoo! Messenger. It was short lived and in April they took the protocol's support away. After I saw this I jumped on Chat 2 and developed a bridge to Messenger for it too. It works great, just as the YCHT bridge did, and now that Yahoo!'s canning Chat 2 protocol there aren't any other protocols of Yahoo!'s left to bridge for anti-boot protection (unless we count YMSG/HTTP which I'm not). Yahoo! doing away with Chat 2 doesn't come as a big surprise to me but having no browser-enabled chat operation doesn't seem to be the best move as I know lots of people that've always counted on chat.yahoo.com's browser-based chat support for "quick" chatting with friends and the flexibility that it provided. Removing the user-created rooms was a huge blow, dropping YCHT protocol support was another big blow, getting rid of /goto and /follow was another big blow and now the removal of Chat 2 protocol as of November 1st is another bad move. If anything good can come out of this I'd say that it could give Yahoo!'s Messenger development team a stronger focus on improving YMSG's operation and focusing completely on it and Yahoo! Messenger. The future for Yahoo! definitely looks to be interoperability with Microsoft's WLM/MSN application and possibly other IM networks down the road as they all soften up and give into the concept of a "super" all-in-one IM network.
Yahoo! likes to keep developers on their toes. Last year I wrote a YCHT protocol bridge for my application so you could use YCHT protocol through Yahoo! Messenger. It was short lived and in April they took the protocol's support away. After I saw this I jumped on Chat 2 and developed a bridge to Messenger for it too. It works great, just as the YCHT bridge did, and now that Yahoo!'s canning Chat 2 protocol there aren't any other protocols of Yahoo!'s left to bridge for anti-boot protection (unless we count YMSG/HTTP which I'm not). Yahoo! doing away with Chat 2 doesn't come as a big surprise to me but having no browser-enabled chat operation doesn't seem to be the best move as I know lots of people that've always counted on chat.yahoo.com's browser-based chat support for "quick" chatting with friends and the flexibility that it provided. Removing the user-created rooms was a huge blow, dropping YCHT protocol support was another big blow, getting rid of /goto and /follow was another big blow and now the removal of Chat 2 protocol as of November 1st is another bad move. If anything good can come out of this I'd say that it could give Yahoo!'s Messenger development team a stronger focus on improving YMSG's operation and focusing completely on it and Yahoo! Messenger. The future for Yahoo! definitely looks to be interoperability with Microsoft's WLM/MSN application and possibly other IM networks down the road as they all soften up and give into the concept of a "super" all-in-one IM network.