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BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE: Business Week ebiz | |||||||||||||||||
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Sending E-Christmas Cards Can Get Very Personal Who says the Internet is cold and impersonal? At sites across the Web, you can create a different holiday greeting for each friend and even speak your own message to Mom The shopping is done. The tree is up. The little electric candles are in the windows. I'm ready for Christmas, and with a few days to spare for once. Well, almost ready. Once again I've put off the Christmas cards, that most tedious of holiday chores, until the last minute. Beyond the last minute. Most years I just fudge it. I cheerily call them New Year's cards in those little handwritten notes that have to go on each one. All right, sometimes Groundhog's Day cards. But friends and family, at least those with e-mail addresses, are going to get Christmas cards on time this year. Emily Post, I suspect, would not approve of electronic greetings that seemingly wing their way through the ether to the recipient, to be called up and viewed once and then left behind forever on some company's hard disk in an anonymous industrial park in San Jose. Too impersonal, she'd say. Not substantive enough for the gift, however token, that Christmas cards are presumed to embody. RELIC OF THE HALLMARK AGE. But hey, this is the Internet Age, and the beginning of a new millennium to boot. And what could be more impersonal than that relic of the Hallmark Age, box after box of identical cards with your sentiment and your full name stamped in gold? Or worse, the Christmas letters of the Xerox Age that ramble on about charitable work and impressive job changes and the various ills and operations of a gaggle of distant relatives and friends who I've never met? This way, I rationalize, I can return to a more personal era. I can match up different cards to different friends. The way most greeting card sites work, I can add personal notes, I can personally select the music that accompanies each card, I can edit or rewrite or eliminate the standard doggerel. I can send cards that are really little video games, so that my friends, or more likely their children, can find the lost star or try to hang ornaments on a cartoon Christmas tree. On the most advanced sites, such as Blue Mountain Arts, I can add my own greeting in my own voice. You can't get much more personal than that.
Then it hits me. The Internet is jammed. It's two days before Christmas, and everyone has the same idea. Later in the evening I try again. It's much faster, but I'm not impressed with the card. The animation looks cheesy, and the message is pretty sappy. I'm reminded of the probably thousands of American Greetings paper cards that I've looked at over the years in drugstore aisles and never once bought. I decide to move on to smaller sites. The beauty of cybercards is that you can find them everywhere on the Web. They're incredibly popular -- Blue Mountain, the category leader, sends more than a million a day and expects to deliver between 5 million and 10 million on Christmas Day alone. Because they're free, they're not profitable, but they build traffic. Senders go to the site to dispatch them. More important, recipients have to go to the site to pick them up. There, they may be persuaded to send their own, or at least look around a bit. A quick search on Google, the search engine, turns up a vast selection -- everything from virtual cards from the Holy Land (www.virtualholyland.com) to paper Arabic and Islamic cards (www.middleeastbooks.com). I browse through the selection at www.3DGreetings.com, a site run by toymaker Mattel. But when I click to preview a card, an unexpected download of the site's proprietary player automatically starts, and it crashes my Netscape browser. When I try later with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, it works flawlessly, but I decide not to put my friends' systems at risk.
I also like www.ohmygoodness.com, a site run for fun by two Italians and an American. It has a couple of Christmas cards themed to the news. I use "The woman who lived in a tree for two years" to zing a few friends who are a little too environmentally conscious. But I really relish "Guess who stole the Mars Polar Lander" for a buddy who works for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I take a peek at www.kinkycards.com after confirming that I'm older than 18. I decide that I can get away with it for a few people. "HAPPY WHICHEVER." I wind up the evening at www.bluemountain.com, a site that I've been avoiding: From reviews I've read, I thought it might be too saccharine for my tastes. They're wrong. I could have completed most of my list here. I'm very taken with the animated game cards for children, especially the all-weather snowman kit, and there's a convenient link to Blue Mountain's Japanese-language sister site, solving a problem that I struggle with every year. I send a voice greeting -- you pick a card and then call a toll-free number to record your voice attachment -- to my mom, the only person I know who'd really want to hear a disembodied me booming out from her computer speakers. And the interfaith section works for an officemate in a mixed relationship who has been debating for weeks whether he should get a Christmas tree. It's a cartoon of Santa and a rabbi sledding together, and the standard greeting is just right: "Happy Whichever." That does it for about half my list. Tonight I'll tackle the rest, the ones that haven't sent me an e-mail address. They'll get the customary paper greeting, late as usual. Under the "Noel" I'll simply write "Happy Millennium." The true cognoscenti will understand that this year I'm actually a year early. Senior Correspondent Armstrong is foolishly hoping to see a White Christmas somewhere near Business Week's Los Angeles bureau. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
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 WEB POINTERS Read our review, then try the sites: Blue Mountain American Greetings 3D Greetings Ecards Audiocard ohmygoodness.com middleeastbooks.com Virtual HolyLand | ||||||||||||
