Online cards: When you care enough to send via Internet

By Jennifer Rothacker / Knight-Ridder Newspapers

HICKORY, N.C. -- It's a Christmas wish come true for procrastinators: electronic mail greeting cards.

To alleviate that laborious practice of hand-writing Christmas cards, licking envelopes until dehydration sets in and spending a small fortune on stamps, greeting card and software companies are touting electronic mail as the hassle-free way to go this year.

While the ability to send Christmas greetings via the Internet has been around as long as e-mail, this is the first season that major card companies like Hallmark and American Greetings have heavily pitched their images and messages for online transmission.

Want a dancing snowman or chuckling Santa? Just cut and paste. Favorite sports stars, Hollywood personalities and even a scanned-in photo of the family can be zapped through the Internet, with a pithy, individualized message underneath. Or if you prefer, just select a prewritten message to express those holiday sentiments.

And it can all be mailed as late as Christmas Eve.

"When you don't remember to buy a card or are too late, it's nice to do something instantaneous without having to run out to the store to buy a card," said Jill Froula with American Greetings. "It's nice for folks with very busy lives."

Programs to create these cards are readily available all over the Internet. Hallmark has teamed up with Microsoft to put 1,700 card selections online, most of which they are offering free this year. They will probably start charging if the novelty takes off.

American Greetings and Micrografx are selling a $49.95 CD-ROM package that offers thousands of card covers, with free demos available on their CreataCard Web site.

And plenty of other Web sites not associated with the greeting card industry provide easy-to-follow steps and a bank of images for users to create cards, free of charge.

For example, the Cleveland Indians baseball team features one with a cleated foot standing on a base with the message "Just touchin' base for the holidays." TV Guide offers old magazine covers, and even Barry Manilow has an array of photos for use.

David Uhler of College Park, Md., liked the TV Guide choices so much, he decided to send Christmas cards for the first time.

"I thought, what the heck, I can send (my friends) this little thing," said Uhler. "It was so easy."

Ease is a big selling point for the companies marketing electronic greetings, who pitch the product as a way to avoid handwriting the same drivel on paper cards.

"Their whole circle of friends grows times two," said Kathi Mishek with Hallmark. "It's more of an opportunity for this individual to participate in people's lives."

While nobody is predicting electronic cards will replace the old favorite paper ones, they have attracted considerable interest from Web users, especially from the younger crowd already comfortable with relying on computers.

In the last two weeks, the number of hits on Hallmark's Web store, which includes its electronic greetings, has been averaging 5 million a day, Mishek said. American Greetings won't specify how many more people are using their CreataCard site this holiday season, but say recent growth has been in double digits.

It's not necessarily for everybody, or every computer, however. Sometimes retrieving the highly technical, often animated greeting cards can wreak havoc on computers, tying up modem lines or even crashing the computer.

"I think I've gotten a few that haven't come through properly," said Dick Hull, a computer science teacher at Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory. "I think the software in this is still new enough that it isn't working properly."

And while many think the idea is nifty, they're not yet sold on abandoning the traditional paper cards.

"I don't think the card companies have to worry about it right now," said Simon Briggs, a computer store employee in Hickory familiar with e-mail cards. "The only people I'd have to send Christmas cards to ... never check their e-mail."

Online greeting card Web sites

The following Web sites are among many offering a wide array of images and even prewritten messages for electronic mail greeting cards:

Hallmark:

www.hallmarkconnections.com

www.hallmark.com

American Greetings:

www.creatacard.com

www.americangreetings.com

Microsoft:

www.greetingsworkshop.msn.com

Center for the Easily Amused:

www.amused.com/card.html

Christmas Adventure Post Office:

www.adventure.simplenet.com/

postcards/christmas/index.html

Christmas Digital:

www.christmas97.com

Christmas Post-A-Card:

www.postacard.com

American Lung Association Christmas Seals:

www.christmasseals.org/form.html

Wired 2000:

www.wired2000.com/postcard/

Christmas.shtml

123Greetings:

www.123greetings.com/christmas/