Gawker: valleywag, zappos.com

Zappos.com Reveals Secret to Selling Overpriced Shoes

Owen Thomas — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 11:52:27 EDT

The dotcom dream is alive! Zappos, the Las Vegas online shoe retailer, has free food, on-site massages, and a life coach! Employees are even paid to Twitter. Just don't mention the November layoffs, okay?

At Zappos, careers live by the Twitter, die by the Twitter

Owen Thomas — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:40:00 EST

No company has embraced Twitter quite like Zappos, the online shoes-and-whatever-else retailer — from its CEO, Tony Hsieh, on down. It even hosts a live feed of all Zappos-related messages on the microblogging service. That has made it easy to gather that the company is going through a tumultuous round of layoffs.

Zappos_Jackie reports that she was laid off an hour ago; other ex-employees are proclaiming their lasting love for Zappos. We look forward to the New York Times updating its trend story about how companies blog about layoffs. They must now Twitter them instead, lest misinformation spread quicker than sluggish RSS feeds. (Oddly, Hsieh never mentioned the pending layoffs in an interview he gave to the Times about Zappos' vaunted corporate culture.)

Users sue Facebook and its Beacon partners for ruining Christmas

Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 10:40:00 EDT

Thirty-two Facebook users signed onto a class-action suit against Facebook and several of its Beacon partners, including Blockbuster, Fandango and Overstock, Hotwire, STA Travel, Zappos.com and Gamefly. Facebook Beacon was the service that reported to a Facebook user's friends that user's activity on partnered sites elsewhere on the Internet. The suit alleges that between November 7, 2007 and December 5, 2007, Facebook did all this without asking first. Technically Facebook did ask, with little pop-up dialogue boxes on partner sites, but apparently they were hard to spot. Still, Beacon did spoil the surprise of a fair number of Christmas gifts, which, as we understand the tradition, are supposed to remain a secret until opened.

The users want Facebook and its partners to delete all stored information, the return of any "ill-gotten gains" — of which we understand there to be none — and for the court to "award restitution." If the plaintiffs win the case it'll at least be interesting to see how much our justice system values a good Christmas surprise in monetary terms. Meanwhile, the technology behind Facebook Beacon is back, but now its called Facebook Connect and now its entirely opt-in.

Is Zappos.com getting into the music business?

Owen Thomas — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:40:00 EDT

Ethan Kaplan, Warner Bros.'s 29-year-old vice president of technology, uses Twitter like his cohorts. Well, almost like his cohorts. He slipped up using Twitter's direct-message feature, and broadcast to the Internet a request to talk to someone in business development at Zappos.com. Despite advertising "Shoes, shoes, shoes!" on its website, Zappos has branched out into selling everything from camping axes to computers. Could it be branching out into music, too? It's hard to think why Kaplan would want to talk to Zappos otherwise — unless he's figured out that the music industry doesn't have much of a future, and it's time to find a job at a more promising company.

Jeff Bezos more interested in BlackBerry than Zappos.com

Scott Kidder — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 14:27:06 EST

Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos didn't seem too attentive in the "Top Ten Lessons Learned in E-Commerce" panel earlier today at the South by Southwest conference in Austin. While Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh presented his ten lessons — "don't compete on price" and "don't worry about competitors" among them — Bezos spent most of the time on his BlackBerry. Captions in the comments, please.