Yahoo Messenger is the most popular instant messenger on the Internet but this popularity doesn't necessarily mean that the application works without any glitch. And this was proved especially in the last two weeks when the application designed by the Sunnyvale company had a weird behavior, returning a lot of errors and strange messages. A few days ago, I wrote an article about the downloadable Yahoo Messenger client that opens a browser window in order to enter my username and password. Today, the web-based version of the application has quite a same strange behavior because it automatically disconnects after approximately 5 minutes of inactivity.

The reason? "Sorry, your session has expired. The message you were working on has not been lost. Click the button bellow to continue with your message. To protect your account, you need to confirm your password periodically." So, my session has expired. What the heck, it is an instant messenger, do I need to keep chatting to remain connected? The interesting fact is that the error didn't allow me to do anything such as browsing my inbox or checking my contact list. Neither the big yellow "Sign In Again & Continue" button worked. The only solution was refreshing the page. And so I did. But it then disconnected me from the email so I had to re-enter my details.

Yahoo tried to do an attractive thing by implementing Yahoo Messenger into the Mail solution. And I admit, it is really an attractive interoperability but, unless it works fine, the users might be disappointed and may start looking for a different solution to communicate using the Yahoo protocol. And for God's sake, there are a lot of other products able to replace Yahoo's web-messenger and I'm already thinking which one should I choose. Just look at Meebo. It was massively improved in the recent period, becoming more than a simple service that allows you to chat straight from a browser window using numerous protocols.