14 DAY TRIAL // This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Smiley emoticon and the Internet companies from all over the world which are using it celebrated this moment in the unique style. Yahoo Messenger is one of the applications which bundled the emoticons and obviously one of those that celebrated the event. According to Sarah Bacon, Product Manager at Yahoo, "last Friday, Carnegie Mellon University celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Smiley emoticon with a gala reception for the students and faculty of the School of Computer Science."
As part of the celebration, the folks working for Yahoo Messenger launched a special student contest with $500 in cash prizes but the company didn't provide too many details about it. Until now, the only thing we know is that Yahoo is the sponsor of the contest, the first prize being offered in 2008.
"Yahoo! Messenger was part of the celebration as well. To mark the anniversary, Professor Fahlman and his colleagues started an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication. This Smiley Award, sponsored by Yahoo!, will carry a $500 cash prize. The first one will be given out in 2008," the Yahoo representative wrote on the official blog of Yahoo Messenger.
Yahoo Messenger has always been one of the top players when it comes to instant messaging clients because it is currently installed on millions of computers from all over the world. Moreover, it is available in several flavors such as PC, Mac OS X, Linux, mobile and even web-based in order to allow the consumers to communicate on the web, no matter what platform they use.
In case you want to download the latest version of Yahoo Messenger, you can take it straight from Softpedia using this link. In addition, the web-based version of the application is available here.