Yahoo IM glitch omits YouTube links

Was it a case of sour grapes or just a coincidental glitch?

A day after Google announced that it had acquired video-sharing site YouTube for $1.6 billion, reportedly beating out Yahoo and other top media companies in a bidding war, some users of Yahoo Instant Messenger discovered they can't transmit links of YouTube videos via Yahoo IM.

The blockage wasn't intentional, said Terrell Karlsten, a Yahoo spokeswoman.

"Yahoo's spam filters were inappropriately identifying some messages with the YouTube URLs as spam," Karlsten said. "There were certain scenarios where we observed false positives with YouTube URLs."

Exactly what triggered these false positives nobody at Yahoo is saying. The company doesn't want to show its hand to spammers, according to Karlsten.

She did say that Yahoo is refining its spam filters and that the problem should be fixed by Tuesday evening.