Yahoo Messenger – a former champion going downhill
Written: Aug 19 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good integration with the Yahoo portal. Still popular.
Cons: Not reliable. MSN is taking over users.
The Bottom Line: Y!M offers tons of features but has reliability problems and is losing users to MSN.
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| ptiemann's Full Review: Yahoo! Messenger |
Preface
I have used ICQ since it early days in 1996/ 97 before AOL bought it for the – back then unbelievable sum of US$ 250,000. My account # is 964211, one of the old 6-figure numbers. I really liked ICQ but then AOL turned it into something that looked like.. umm.. well, something like AOL. Lots of colors and icons. Popup windows with banner ads. When I joined epinions I soon joined the epinions Yahoo club and we had a lively chat scene there. After years of disliking Yahoo I finally I installed the Yahoo messenger.
In 2001 I changed to MSN messenger. I think Yahoo is going downhill. Let’s take a look at the Y!M (shorthand for “Yahoo Messenger”). It’s a good product with pros and cons.
Pros:
- Installation is quick & easy (I walked my parents through it over the phone)
- Y!M is definitely easy to use. I find it more usable than ICQ nowadays. What bugs me most in ICQ is that to close it from the system tray, I have to open it first and then close the window. Y!M and MSN messenger allow to exit from the tray popup menu.
- Y!M has lots of features and offers a great integration into the Yahoo portal (email, voice chat, radio Yahoo! FM, search engine, stock tracking with alerts, news ticker, calls computer to phone via Net2Phone technology).
- Widely used because Yahoo is so popular. Y!M was the leading messenger 2 years ago but with Yahoo’s problems, MSN has picked up. See articles under “Reference”.
- Voice chat really saves on your phone bill (if it works)
- Less intrusive user interface than ICQ with it’s annoying colorful user interface
- More platforms than anyone else (Windows, Mac, Java, Linux, Palm OS, Windows CE, WAP). This is one of the reasons why it’s so popular.
- One can customize the “I am away” message (MSN doesn’t offer this)
- Never unwanted messages. I always find weird instant messages when I start my ICQ client.
Cons:
- ICQ has better or more messaging options
- Conferencing is easy but I like it better how its done in MSN messenger
- Y!M is sometimes slow, and has more frequent downtimes than MSN. I know quite a few people who made the move from Y!M to MSN which ultimately caused me to switch to MSN as well. Some news articles at the end show that MSN is indeed the leading messenger now.
- No video chat (MSN has that via NetMeeting – cool!)
- Pasting large blocks of text is limited to 800 characters - I have to split it up. MSN messenger allows even only 400 characters per “sentence” but 800 is still an annoyance. Why can’t they allow me to paste 10,000 characters e.g. a complete email???
- Y!M supports only the “Yahoo” protocol – it cannot connect to MSN or AIM as some of the new 3rd-party messengers can (Jabber Instant Messenger supports ICQ, MSN and Yahoo). I would expect MSN to support other protocols soon.
- Buggy. Example 1: Sometimes friends would not receive messages that I sent when they were offline. Example 2: I appeared repeatedly on one friend’s block list although she never put me there. She’d take me off and a few weeks later I was there back again.
- File transfer seemed to never work. I rather email files. Yahoo doesn’t allow to plug-in a virus scanner.
- MSN shows whether the other side is typing, I like that. Y!M doesn't offer this.
A soft fact
All those pros and cons were rather hard facts. There’s a “attitude factor” or a “soft fact” that I want to bring up. Around March 2001 Yahoo decided to make some money by partnering up with the porn industry by displaying banners to porn sites and click-to-buy-adult-toys-links when someone did a search for specific keywords. They figured “Sex sells”, and this is particularly true on the Internet and they were going through a hard time. (See the links at the end of this article for more details.)
Conservative fellows didn’t like this announcement and within a week Yahoo changed their plans and in this step they also closed many adult oriented clubs. It may be true that some of those clubs have been to organize swapping of child pornography (which is always used as a commonly regarded “bad thing”) but I heard that they closed many “innocent” clubs. Much like AOL with it’s famous block of news groups that contained the word “breast” and people couldn’t discuss “breast cancer” anymore.
Yahoo did not earn points in my book there. On the other hand, Microsoft has never censored content. Maybe because of MS’s software earnings they are more independent than Yahoo. Yahoo’s users are its capital and they have to be a lot more careful to appeal to the majority. While this is not a hard fact on the messenger, it has to do with the Yahoo portal and especially since Y!M is so tightly integrated, I think it does matter.
Conclusion
Yahoo is not a bad choice. I would have stayed with them in spite of their stability problems but my best online friends moved to MSN messenger, so .. yesterday I removed Y!M from my computers. If you want a lot of features and gimmicks, go with Yahoo or ICQ (both available on several platforms). I just want plain instant messaging and that’s what MSN delivers.
Reference:
I tried to figure out the user base of different messengers. Looks like MSN is really picking up:
MSN Messenger Tops the Charts (05/2001)
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,49863,00.asp
MSN Messenger is the no. 1 choice of Canadians
http://biz.yahoo.com/cnw/010704/msn_ca_no_1_in_canada.html
MSN Hotmail Tops 100 Million User Milestone
http://www.microsoft.com/MSCorp/presspass/Press/2001/May01/05-14Hotmail100PR.asp
Here some material how Yahoo took down content:
Yahoo in Porn Foe's Sights
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,44619,00.html
Yahoo Does About-Face On Adult Entertainment
http://content.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010413S0009
Yahoo Pulls the Porn
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,23692,00.html
Recommended:
No
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ptiemann
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Member: Peter Tiemann
Location: Capitola, CA
Reviews written: 260
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