Woot® : One Day, One Deal™

Today at noon Central time - a scant fifty minutes from now - our team of hilarity-peddlers will take to our @WootLive Twitter account to wring a few more drops of mirth from yet another Apple wingding. Maybe we'll offer pithy yet scathing commentary on the nature of consumerism today; maybe we'll just add "in my pants" to everything Jobs says. Either way, satirical brilliance is approximately 65% likely to ensue.

If you're not following @WootLive yet, congratulations on having better things to do with your life than laugh. What a cold, lonely place your world must be.

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Cool stuff. Tight schedules. Irresistible good looks. Woot and Longshot Magazine have a lot in common. We throw together a gut-bustingly hilarious product description every single day; Longshot throws together a whole magazine (in print, web, and iPad versions) in 48 hours. And we've both received some pretty impressive cease-and-desist letters.

So it's only natural that Longshot take one of their many excellent art submissions and turn it into a t-shirt available only through Shirt.Woot. The design relates to the theme of issue #1, "Comeback", and you can only see it (and buy it) at the link above.

If you're not hip to the Longshot groove, please enjoy some selections from Issue Zero on the theme "Hustle", which was excellent despite the inexplicable rejection of a submission by one of your favorite Woot writers. But hey, under a deadline like that, anybody can make a mistake. We're honored to partner with you, Longshot, and we wish your mag nothing but the best. Long may you shoot!

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This week marks a big change for the Woot Podcast: We’re going to video!

That’s right, starting today, the Woot Podcast transmogrifies into a once-weekly moving picture presentation you can watch every Monday from the comfort of your own home, cubicle, university library, or anywhere the Internet is found!

This week’s episode features Mortimer & Monte, but future installments may include more “Real Actual Field Tests,” video versions of “Happy Snacking!” recipes, and occasionally even an on-screen appearance by a member of the Podcast Team. (That’ll be a courageous achievement, considering they’re all significantly handicapped in the looks department.)

We didn’t make this change capriciously. Shoot, for almost five years we’ve produced an audio-only podcast, convinced online video was a passing fad. Then we saw that Keyboard Cat, though, and the writing was on the wall. It said “Intrenet vidz r here 2 stay LOLOL!!!!!”

We’re excited to explore the possibilities of another medium, and we hope you’ll enjoy the Woot Podcast 2.0 every bit as much as you did the original, audio-only version. Unless you hated the original, audio-only podcast with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns, in which case we hope you’ll enjoy this version slightly better.

We understand change can be painful, so here’s a coping strategy for those seven or eight of you who were sentimentally attached to the way the Woot Podcast used to be: Simply close your eyes during the video and it’ll seem exactly like the old audio version.

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Hey, wouldn't it be awesome if we hid a coupon code in a podcast that only worked once, so the first wooter to try it got today's product free? And then wouldn't it be awesome if the whole idea actually worked as planned? Well, we managed to get the first part right in today's Wootcast, "I Sliced an Avocado". If you sat through four-and-a-half of the dopiest, most inane minutes of novelty music this side of Rednex, you heard the coupon code. But if you tried to use it, well, that's where things broke down. Note to coders: the difference between an empty string and a null string is surprisingly significant.

What to do, what to do? Since nobody else has a stronger claim and it'd be a shame to let a perfectly good AVOCADOBUTT go to waste, we're awarding the coupon code (and hence, the free Ecomposter) to a wooter by the name of chris12345 (pictured at left). He was the first Wootcast listener to post a comment on the podcast discussion thread, so if this somewhat arbitrary choice offends your sense of fair play, consider it a reward for participating in the Woot forums.

chris12345 says he's been listening to the Wootcast since early 2009 because "It's usually funny, and Matthew has a nice voice." His favorites are the many Shanties of Bluetooth - but even that kind of experience doesn't prepare one for an onslaught of irritation like "I Sliced an Avocado". How'd you endure it, chris12345? "I was reading through some things on Deals.Woot at the time," he reports. "It may have distracted me just enough that I still got the gist of the podcast without my brain turning to mush." Deals.Woot: protecting brains from Wootcast-induced mushification since 2009.

But remember, chris12345, if you ever do find your brain going mushy, don't just flush it down the toilet like most people would. Put it to good use with your brand-new Ecomposter!

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To be uncharacteristically serious for half a nanosecond, yes, Woot has signed an agreement to be acquired by Amazon. It shouldn't change anything much for us or you after the deal closes, we just figured you’d like to know a few details. You see, when two companies meet over drinks and some light jazz and decide they'd like to get to know each other better… You know what? Our CEO said it best in his letter to us employees...

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Holy crap! Woot has signed an agreement with Amazon - yes, the Amazon - to become an independent subsidiary of the ecommerce colossus. Woot HQ will remain in Carrollton, Texas, and will operate as autonomously as other Amazon companies like Zappos and Audible. More details forthcoming after we pick our eyeballs up off of the floor. Anybody see where Lefty rolled off to?

Here's more:

• Amazon, Woot, and You: But Mostly Woot: our CEO, Matt Rutledge, shares "his" "thoughts".
• "We Got Acquired By Amazon": one of the fifty best rapping-monkey-puppet-corporate-acquisition-hip-hop videos of the year.

Direct press/media inquiries to  media@woot.com.

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You demanded it, so we listened. The first time we tried a Woot Hunt scavenger game thing, the only complaint we heard was that it was too easy. So we're upping the difficulty! We're still using Google Street View for our clues. But we in the Geography department tried hard to come up with some twists that seemed like (to us, anyway) they'd be impossible to solve. So, of course, we expect you to have this whole thing figured out in like ten minutes.

Oh, and instead of Twitter, this time the action goes down on the Woot Facebook page at 1 PM Central. Just log in to Facebook, click that "like" button on our page, and you'll be able to play along... but how, you ask? This how:

1. We'll post each new clue and link as a status update.
2. Submit your answer as a comment to that status update.
3. The first person to do so wins that round.
4. If it seems like y'all are having trouble, watch for the Hint Gremlin. He'll pop into the comment thread with an additional nudge or two toward the right answer.
5. Once a round is solved, we'll declare the winner, then wait a few minutes and post the next one. There will be 14 clues in all.
6. If you win a round, email your mailing address to jtoon@woot.com and we'll send your prize. Do NOT email your answers to the clues. Post them as comments, like we said in #2.

So sharpen your pointy little heads and we'll see you at the Woot Facebook page at 1 PM Central.

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As several irate followers have found to their dismay, our @WootLive twitter feed is not the place to go for concise announcements of the latest products. (That would be @Woot for the main site, or any of our other feeds for the other Woot sites.) WootLive's live-tweets of the last couple of Apple announcements have clogged thousands of twitter pages around the world, and we're going to try something else today: Woot Hunt!

Here's how it'll work. Beginning at 2:30 p.m. Central time, @WootLive will tweet a link to a Google Street View image. Somewhere near that location there's a clue about which city the hunt will take us to next. It could be a street sign, the name of a business, or just about anything else. But it'll always have the name of the next city spelled out clearly. The first person to tweet back the answer with the hashtag #woothunt wins that round.

Will it be fun? We don't know yet. Will anybody play? We hope so. What will you win? It's a surprise.

But you can't win anything if you're not following @WootLive, so get thee hence to that Twitter feed and we'll see you at 2:30. Can't make it just then? We'll post the spoiler-free chain of clues here later this afternoon. On your marks... ready... set...

UPDATE: whoa! So many wooters joined in the fun that it was all over in, like, 15 minutes. Next time we do something like this, we'll make it tougher. We promise never to underestimate you again. If you weren't among the throng playing this afternoon, here are the eight clues in order:

• First Clue
• Second Clue
• Third Clue
• Fourth Clue
• Fifth Clue
• Sixth Clue
• Seventh Clue
• Eighth Clue

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Hey, if you're looking for info about Woot avatars, or you just want to show yours off, see this blog post right here, 'K?

Stalking your fellow wooters just got a little easier with the launch of our new member profile pages. To see yours, go to http://members.woot.com/ and, assuming you’re logged in to Woot, it’ll default to your profile page. To see someone else’s profile page, add their username to the URL after the last slash, like this: http://members.woot.com/Jason Toon. Now let us tell you what all that crap is.

• That hideously ugly, uproariously funny cartoon on your member page is your custom Woot avatar. Generated from component parts drawn by the famed Will “Goopy” Guy, nobody else has one quite like it. If you hate it, you can click “change avatar” to choose another from your bench of five custom avatars. Read more about avatars in today’s companion blog post. And if you really, really hate the whole idea, and you also hate fun and joy, you can choose your Twitter, Facebook, or Gravatar avatar. You also do this by clicking “change avatar” on your member profile page, and then a bunch of other stuff that we’ll explain later in this blog post.
• The Recent Activity stream shows your recent forum posts and whatnot. You can see activity across all Woot sites or choose a specific one to see activity on that site – with a couple of exceptions. Our Everything But Woot forum isn’t connected to this system yet. We’re working on it, believe me, since almost one-third of all Woot forum posts are in there. And Deals.Woot isn’t quite tied in yet, either. For now, choosing Deals.Woot on the Recent Activity drop-down will take you to links to your Deals.Woot user page. Again, we’re working this out, so expect a 360-degree summary of all your dot-Woot activity soon.
• We’ve also enabled you to log in to Woot using your Facebook account, your Twitter account, or any OpenID account like Google, Yahoo!, or AIM. On our humble little login page, you’ll now see options for all of those services. Click one and take it from there. Or, if that’s too confusing, read the instructions later in this blog post.

We’re so anxious to roll this member-profile system out that not all the edges are softened yet. All this account-connectin’ and avatar-selectin’ will be more seamless and less confusing pretty soon. Advanced users, go nuts. If you’re a little less comfortable with all this login business, follow the instructions after the jump. If you just want to keep your Woot experience simple, do nothing. And, as always, pelt us with your questions in the forum thread below.

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Ever wished you could put a face to a username on our message boards? And furthermore, have you wished that face would be bizarre, unsettling, and maybe a little cute? Then you and your similarly-inclined pals are going to love our new Woot forum avatars. Someday, when people talk about 2010 as the post-avatar era, it won’t have anything to do with James Cameron.

Yes, from now on your forum posts will be accompanied by a unique cartoon grotesquerie created by slam-bang all-star illustrator Will Guy, aka Goopy of goopymart and Sea Chimp fame. You can choose from five different designs on your shiny new member profile page (oh, yeah, you can read about that whole deal in another blog post). They’re automatically generated from heads, arms, legs, tails, antlers, tentacles, beards, claws, and other parts drawn by Goopy, so every avatar is completely unique. Goopy gave us enough parts for something like 70 quadrillion combinations (seriously).

No, you can’t make your own. You didn’t get to choose your real-life face before you were born, did you? But those who prefer to live in a Huxleyan dystopia of embryo engineering and designer cheekbones can also choose your flattering Facebook, Twitter, or Gravatar avatar instead, right there on the member profile page. Again, see the other blog post for more about that.

What does your forum avatar look like in the wild? Just post below (like we needed to encourage you to do that) and take a look. To see a higher-res version of it, or to choose a different one, get thee hence to your profile page: go to http://members.woot.com/ and, assuming you’re logged in to Woot, it’ll default to your profile page. To see someone else’s profile page, add their username to the URL after the last slash, like this: http://members.woot.com/Jason Toon.

OK, you’ve seen my pink-eyed, bouffanted, fuzzy-faced, insectoid self – now show me yours!

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