An E-card is a postcard, sent by means of the Internet, usually through e-mail.

A users sending an e-card to a person would select a pre-written card style with image and message, and would add their own personal message, and specify the recipient's e-mail address. On sending the card, the recipient would receive an e-mail with a link to the e-card provider's webpage, and this link would go to the e-card as a webpage, with the sender's personal message and card. Note that the actual card is not usually sent through the e-mail, but only a link to the card hosted as a website.

There are five common types of visual E-Cards. "Flash Animated" which use Macromedia's "Flash" software, "Postcards" which use static (non-moving) images, "Animated" cards which are similar to Postcards yet may have some minor repetative movement, JavaScript cards which typically combine Postcard images with some kind of JavaScript-based animation, and most recently Talking greeting cards.

Flash Animated cards are typically the most advanced and popular cards. Flash Animated cards are typically used to create a full animated effect, similar to an animated cartoon. They can also be interactive, asking the viewer to perform an action or press a button.

Postcards are the oldest form of E-Cards and are still popular. They typically show more artistic or nature images such as animals, mountains, sunsets, people, or other scenic scenes.

History

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Around 1996, E-Cards became a popular web feature that was easy for webmasters to offer at a low cost. It was around the same time that dedicated E-card web sites emerged. E-cards were also added to large portals like MSN and AOL. E-Cards were also added to many corporate web sites (as part of a friendly PR, branding, community building strategy) and also as a lead generation tool.

Excite@Home bought the web site Blue Mountain Arts (which operate bluemountain.com, an e-Card site) for $780M in October 1999 (which represent a price of $71 per unique monthly user). The transaction has been referenced by CNN and Business 2.0 as evidence of the Dot-com bubble. On September 13, 2001, three weeks before filining for Bankruptcy on October 1, 2001, Excite@Home sold BlueMountain.com for $35M, or $3.23 per unique monthly user. The web site BlueMountain.com remains a large web site, primarily focused on E-Cards. Other large E-card web sites include, Hallmark.com, eGreetings.com, American Greetings, and 123Greetings.com.

Originally, most E-Cards were free. While free greeting cards are still the most prevalent and popular, some sites charge for either all e-cards or special premium e-cards.

Security

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Since the e-card company knows the e-mail address of the recipient and often also the sender, and whether the recipient reads the card, spammers sometimes use E-Cards for finding active e-mail addresses.

Sending an e-card to a given recipient invariably involves giving that recipient's email address to the e-card service -- a third party. As with other third-party email services (such as mailing-list companies), the operator has the chance to misuse this address. One example of misuse is if the e-card service sends advertisements to the recipient's address. Under anti-spam rules used by major ISPs, such advertisements would be spam, since the recipient never asked ("opted in") to receive them. ^* The e-card sender as well as the service could be held responsible for the act of spamming, since while the service sent the spam, the e-card sender provided the address.

In some cases, it may be illegal for an organization or business to use an e-card service to send greetings to its customers. For instance, data privacy laws may forbid a business from disclosing information about customers to a third party -- including names and email addresses.

See also

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• Cardmaking
• Greeting cards
• E-mail
• Hallmark Cards

References

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• http://money.cnn.com/2005/12/23/technology/eyeballs_biz20_122305/
• http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2001/09/10/daily70.html

External links

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Stationery | Ephemera | E-mail

E-Card