April 21, 2008 on 10:59 pm | In Events, Fun Stuff | 12 Comments
Every year, Yahoo! gets into the spirit of Earth Day and educates our users about what they can personally do to make a difference for the environment. This year, our focus is on the “Reuse” part of the often heard “Reduce-Reuse-Recycle” creedo.
Did you know that there are reuse groups around the world whose mission is to give used items away for free to other people in their community who can use them rather than throwing them away? Items like furniture, dishes, bikes, and electronics.
You can find out more about Earth Day and how to become part of the worldwide reuse effort on the Yahoo! Earth Day website at http://green.yahoo.com/earth-day. You can even find a local reuse group in your area whose members may need some of those items that are gathering dust in your closet or garage. Plus you never know what free items you might come away with.
While you’re thinking green, why not get your Avatar in the mood too? Head over to the Yahoo! Avatars website to get decked out in fun Earth Day apparel. Then help spread the word about Earth Day to all your friends on Messenger!
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
March 4, 2008 on 1:13 pm | In Events, Fun Stuff | 11 Comments
Back in September 2007, we told you about a celebration at Carnegie Mellon University that honored the Emoticon. Twenty five years earlier, Professor Scott Fahlman was the first to use the text version of the emoticon with his colleagues on a computer message board. To mark the anniversary, Professor Fahlman and his colleagues teamed up with Yahoo! to start an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication, now known as the Smiley Award.
Last week, “One Cold Hand” (http://onecoldhand.com), a website designed to reunite lost gloves with their mates, was named the winner of the inaugural Smiley Award. “One Cold Hand” was created by Jennifer Gooch, a graduate student in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Art, and Turadg Aleahmad, a doctoral student in the Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) – part of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. They will share the $500 first prize, and their names will be engraved on a plaque kept on permanent display at the university.
Winner Jennifer Gooch said. “A lot of my current work and research looks at how people use technology in order to connect. As a native of Dallas, we didn’t need gloves very often. When I moved [to Pittsburgh, PA] I noticed them everywhere, lying on the ground lonely and useless. I thought a site to reunite gloves — a dating site for gloves, as it were — would be an interesting metaphor for our attempt to find what’s missing.”
A Smiley Award honorable mention went to “Moodjam” created by doctoral student Ian Li. Moodjam is an online diary that allows people to express their moods and feelings using patterns of color. Another honorable mention went to “Buxfer” (http://www.buxfer.com), a free, Web-based application that allows its users to easily keep track of shared expenses, which is handy for roommates, student social groups and many others. Buxfer was created by computer science doctoral students Ashwin Bharambe, Amit Manjhi and Shashank Pandit.
The winning student projects were chosen by a panel of faculty and student judges at Carnegie Mellon and Yahoo! joined in the celebration held on campus last week (see pics here).
Congratulations to “One Cold Hand” for winning the first Smiley Award! We look forward to seeing even more innovation inspired by Smiley in the coming years.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
Here are some photos of the Smiley Award party, held last week at Carnegie Mellon University (photos courtesy of Ralf Brown):
View a larger slideshow
February 14, 2008 on 12:15 am | In Avatars, Events, Fun Stuff | 3 Comments
Does your Avatar have the hots for another Avatar? Ready to make the ultimate commitment?
Yahoo! has partnered with Diet Dr. Pepper for a Valentine’s Day promotion called “Valentine’s in Vegas: Marry my Avatar”. Type in the Yahoo! ID of the Avatar you want to get hitched to, and voila, you’ll see your betrothed avatars together in front of a Las Vegas wedding chapel (Elvis not included).
To make sure your Avatar is appropriately dressed before taking the plunge, head over to Yahoo! Avatars and enter “wedding” into the search box.
If your Avatar does elope to Vegas for a quickie wedding, it’s only right that you send out picture proof to your friends and family (or the paparazzi). Just click to share it on del.icio.us, Yahoo! Messenger or Facebook.
Check out the Valentine’s in Vegas gallery to see Avatars that have already tied the knot today.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
January 15, 2008 on 10:45 am | In Events, Mac version | 36 Comments
In case you’re headed to Macworld this week in San Francisco, keep an eye out for a team of Yahoo! Messenger for Mac engineers. They’ve been working hard so we thought we’d give them a chance to catch up on all things Mac. They are clad in Yahoo! Messenger for Mac t-shirts so feel free to stop one of them and catch up on the most recent features of our Mac application.
And as Mr. Jobs says, “One more thing…” - we are working hard to add voice capabilities to our next release. Stay tuned for more updates.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
September 27, 2007 on 9:54 am | In Events, Fun Stuff | 33 Comments
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.
The CMU students reserved their monthly TG (short for TGIF) social to recognize this remarkable icon of the Internet age - a simple three keystroke image that morphed into personalized renderings of the mood people wanted to put into a conversation or post. The original emoticon - 
- was first used by CMU Professor Scott Fahlman as a way to communicate humor when posting messages to some early online bulletin boards.
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.
Yahoo! Messenger engineer Anurag Gupta also attended the event, demonstrating some of our latest product innovations, including the humorous Shumbee prototype that came out of a Hack Day earlier this year. Check out more pictures from Smiley’s anniversary party.
Thanks to the crew at CMU’s School of Computer Science for throwing Smiley a great anniversary party. And special thanks to Ken Schmidt from Yahoo! Academic Relations for the event photos and report. Here’s to 25 more years of innovation in communication!
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
