The Eyes of Silver Breeze

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.

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.

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!

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.

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...

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?

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.

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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!

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.

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.