So long egreetings, I barely cared for you

It's come to my attention that my mailbox is no longer filled with those slightly underwhelming egreetings I used to receive back in the early part of the new millennium.

Not that I mind. I found those missives via email link slightly disappointing. Nothing says, "I nearly forgot your birthday" or "I can't be bothered to write with a pen" like a hasty ecard.

There's a singular tepidness of feeling when you send something that's really just clip art and a few data fields. And on my part, the sentiment is reciprocated with a cursory click, skim, delete, often without clicking on the actual link to the card.

I'll come clean - I've sent ecards. I like to think that my selection was usually superior to most, speed-chosen witty cartoons from the New Yorker expressing slight disengagement.

But of late, I've noticed the decline of the ecard. They are going the way of the free t-shirts you got when an old-line organization first launched their websites [the t-shirts inevitably featured their crusty old logo with ".com" in Courier].

Struck by a last-minute greeting emergency recently, I found many of my old go-to websites no longer helpfully offer the service of a branded card. I also observed - gasp! - some sites are starting to charge for customized artwork.

And when I send an ecard, there's the added anxiety that my greeting will be the subject of suspicion, filed under "phishing," "spam" or "the sort of email that falls between blanket group emails and forwarded jokes."

The ecard's had a short life. It began at MIT, created by Judith Donath in 1994 as "the Electric Postcard." The project launched December 1994, and a year later, about three-quarters of a million cards had been sent; six months after, it was close to 1.7 million. During the 1995-96 Christmas season, there were days when over 19,000 cards were sent.

Fast forward to modern times, and according to the Greeting Card Association "Worldwide, an estimated 500 million e-cards are sent each year."

Here's what Donath says about the project in her thesis:

"The most significant function of the postcard, and the reason, I believe, for the great popularity of The Electric Postcard, is that they allow people to keep in touch without having to actually say anything.

A notable thing about postcards is how trite the messages often are: ``The weather is great. Wish you were here.'' A letter like that would be ludicrous, even rude. Yet the main point of a postcard is its subtext: I'm thinking of you, just checking in, making the rounds remotely."

[my bold for emphasis]

Egreetings left the lab in 1995 when E-cards.com was launched (the code was open source), and graduated to solids in October 1999, when Excite@Home bought the web site Blue Mountain Arts for $780M. On September 13, 2001, Excite@Home sold BlueMountain.com to American Greetings for $35M, three weeks before it filed for bankruptcy and the sound of "pop" could be heard coming from the dot com bubble.

BlueMountain.com is still around, making it "easy and fun to stay in touch with all the special people" in my life with one easy subscription. Unfortunately, I'm looking to "occasionally touch base with acquaintances," so I don't think it's the service for me.

Donath reflects that, "The Electric Postcard lets the user send a piece of the Web as a personal statement . . . the postcards make the information space into a source for personal expression."

So what does that say about me, the lethargic egreeter? I've moved on, the information space has shifted and I'm expressing myself in other ways. Nah, just a bad correspondent.