This was like no other shopping site. There were basically three sections to Jellyfish:
Reverse Auctions.
This was exactly what it sounds like. They would offer either a single item or multiple quantities of that item and the price would decrease until it sold out.
Cashback.
If you followed the proper link to one of the partnership sites, you could get a percentage of the purchase price returned to you. This part of the site still lives on. It's now called Bing Cashback. On websites like Slickdeals it is often abbreviated as BCB. It wasn't Microsoft's creation. It's merely something they purchased.
Social Networking.
Every user had a homepage with a live chat box, friends list, and shopping/wish lists. You could go through the Cashback section and add items you wanted or had bought to a list so that they could be visited later or viewed by your friends.
Shortly after Microsoft bought the site, things began to change and some users feared the worst. The frequency of the reverse auctions decreased significantly and the number of items available went from several to just one, among other things.
I recorded a video expressing my confidence in Jellyfish on September 1st, 2008. I believed it would recover. I just now discovered this video on my HDD.
So...Yeah...I was wrong. The site was shut down at Midnight, on February 16th, 2009.
Jellyfish was awesome. It was the most fun of any comparison shopping engine or retail site. A lot of the frequent users found refuge in a facebook group, and I've even added quite a few of them to my personal friends list. It was a close-knit community, with unique and vibrant characters, loving caretakers and very methodical, interesting and entertaining trolls.
Microsoft did what big business does, and took only what was profitable. I can't say I'm mad at them or upset. However, at this point, the fact remains, it's gone. I don't think there will ever be another site to give the same or even a remotely similar social shopping experience to that of Jellyfish.
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