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An E-card is an electronic postcard or greeting card, sent by means of the Internet, usually through e-mail.
A sender of an e-card 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 at the e-card provider's website.citation needed]
There are five common types of visual E-Cards.citation needed] "Flash Animated" which use Macromedia's "Flash" software as those found on Bijbo-ecards.com, "Postcards" which use static (non-moving) images, "Animated" cards which are similar to Postcards yet may have some minor repetitive movement, JavaScript cards which typically combine Postcard images with some kind of JavaScript-based animation, and most recently Talking greeting cards, which incorporate speech synthesis. Flash animated (talking) greeting cards, such as those found on Bluemountain.com or uptv.net, allow the user to tell an animated image to say whatever the person wants (in this way, they can be interactive, asking the viewer to perform an action, press a button, or ask the viewer to choose a picture to animate)[1]. Flash Animated cards are typically the most advanced and popular cardscitation needed]. They are typically used to create a full animated effect, similar to an animated cartoon.[2]
Postcards are the oldest form of E-Cards and are still popular.citation needed] They typically show more artistic or nature images such as animals, mountains, sunsets, people, or other scenic scenes.
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Contents
- 1 History
- 2 Security
- 3 See also
- 4 References
- 5 External links
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History
Around 1996, E-Cards became a popular web feature that was easy for webmasters to offer at a low cost.citation needed] 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,[1] an e-Card site) for $780M in October 1999 (which represent a price of $71 per unique monthly user).citation needed] 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 to American Greetings for $35M, or $3.23 per unique monthly user.citation needed] The web site BlueMountain.com remains a large web site, primarily focused on E-Cards.
Originally, most E-Cards were free, by virtue of being sponsored by advertising. While free greeting cards are still the most prevalent and popular, some sites charge for either all e-cards or special premium e-cards.citation needed]
Security
Since many e-card companies are privy to the e-mail address of the recipient and often also the sender, and whether the recipient reads the card, spammers can 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.[3] 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.citation needed]
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.citation needed]
