It was a year ago today that Jellyfish.com launched their Smack Shopping reverse auction feature. Initially, it featured an unknown quantity of one item per day, starting at noon central time. The first item ever “smacked” was a 2GB silver iPod Nano. Because of a technical glitch with the site, Jellyfish ended up giving them all away for free. (Smack Daddy’s middle name is “Fair.”)
Over the past year, Smack Shopping has evolved dramatically. On Black Friday 2006, Smack Shopping offered its first 24-hour reverse auction Smack-a-Thon, with new deals going up every two hours. Cyber Monday 2006 was Speed Smack day, six hours of one item after another and prices dropping super-fast on each. The first guru points contest was in November, but it wasn’t an ongoing feature of the Smack.
By December, Smack Shopping offered more than one item per day (an unknown quantity of each), but still started at noon. Smack Shopping went on vacation from 12/22 through 1/2 to give Jellyfish employees a little family time during the holidays. When they returned, we saw the introduction of the Smack Wheel (where the person with the closest guess to the best winning percentage-off got to spin the wheel for a prize) and user voting on the first product to be Smacked each day (phased out in May when Smack Shopping went 24/7). The Guru Points leaderboard was begun.
February saw our first sponsored Smacks, and in March Jellyfish started hosting a Wednesday night Smack Show for those who couldn’t make the noontime show. A new version of the Smack interface went live in late April — this introduced Shopping Buddies, individual pages, and personal Living (chat) Rooms. Thus, the Cave was born. 
(inside reference, sorry) Also in April was the introduction of the Smack Hero of the Day (Noctis has the distinction of being the first).
On May 16, the first Outwit game was played (Travel50 won), and on May 23rd, Smack Shopping became a 24/7 feature of Jellyfish. Shows that were hosted, on Wednesday nights and the weekday shows at noon, had cashback dropping at a faster rate than non-hosted shows. On June 28th, waiting for a cashback rebate for Smack purchases was eliminated — the ending price was what you paid.
Captchas were required to opt-in for guru guessing in July, to help weed out bots suspected of cheating the system in order to win the prizes offered for the top guru leaderboard spots. SmackDaddy’s Quest started (and Quest Points were introduced). I got chosen as Smack Hero in July, too, which was pretty cool. 
In August, Quest Pot Bonuses were added to Outwit, for those participating in SmackDaddy’s Quest (which was really basically a referral contest). And the Quest culminated in a big event: Smacking a car on September 5th! September 28th was SmackFest, a Jellyfish user meeting in Madison, Wisconsin hosted by Jellyfish themselves. Attendees were among the first to be told that Jellyfish had been purchased by Microsoft, which everyone else found out about on October 2nd.
October whizzed by, with many concerns about the future of not just Smack Shopping but Jellyfish.com in general (though Jellyfish management has assured us they plan to be around for a while). And here we are again, November 1st, the first anniversary of Jellyfish Smack Shopping.
It’s been a wild year, with a lot of changes in the format of the Smack, as well as ups and downs in the relationships of the Smack Talkers. Ask a rabid Jellyfish Smacker about “Hot Nuts,” “Rubber Chickens,” “Sporks,” “Smackbot,” “Dilli Double,” “Sam Beckett,” “Smack of Shame,” or “Moosing,” and they’ll tell you all about the inside jokes, the camaraderie, and yes, sometimes the feuding, that have all become a part of our little community. Smack Talkers are very, VERY loyal to Jellyfish. If you haven’t joined Jellyfish yet, you are really missing out on something…join today!
