MakeUseOf » ecards

PayPal Launches Facebook App For Sending Money [News]

Matt Smith — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 22:31:07 +0000

Looking to send money to a friend this holiday season? Now you can easily do it through Facebook, using PayPal’s brand new “Send Money” app.

This new app, though created by PayPal, is not a substitute for the company’s normal website or most of its features. Instead, it focuses only on sending money to other people, and while you can send some dough to anyone for any reason, the focus seems to be on gifts for special occasions.

Built-in e-cards can be sent along with the cash, and focus on a variety of special occasions such as anniversaries, birthdays, and graduations. Each occasion has its own category filled with appropriate e-cards. The cards themselves aren’t much – just small pictures with a phrase attached – but they’re posted to the recipient’s Facebook wall when you send the cash. Only the sender and recipient can see how much was sent.

Before you check it out, be warned that there’s a number of different so-called PayPal apps listed on Facebook that may point you in the wrong direction. The one that you want is called PayPal Send Money, and is represented by a PayPal icon with a blue background.

Source: Mashable

Spread Some Love! Make Your Own Beautiful E-Cards With Card Karma

Saikat Basu — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:00:24 +0000

When it comes to ecards or greetings cards, the common opinion is that the days of lending them a personal touch are over. There was a time when you could hunker down and create your own cards if you really wanted to make it personal. But that touch of love-effort has been eliminated from our lives thanks to the crop of ecard and greetings websites that are out there now.

Somewhere down the line I have felt that we need to get rid of templates and boilerplates from our lives, and get back our originality. Thankfully, when it comes to ecards, a site like Card Karma allows us to do that…short of drawing illustrations ourselves.

With the holiday season in some parts of the world just a month away, let’s check out how Card Karma can help you make your own ecards, and share them with the world.

Doing Away With Pre-Made Greeting Cards

Card Karma says that when it comes to creating personal ecards, you will only be limited by your own imagination rather than the small selection of pre-made ecards. Card Karma offers you no templates, but allows you to roam free and pick the best from Flickr, YouTube, and any image that you may want to use from your desktop to illustrate the card.

All images and videos that are available on the site come under Creative Commons. So, you really have millions of images or videos to choose from as Flickr and YouTube are virtual gold mines thanks to ‘free’ spirited creative hands.

A glimpse reveals that there’s loads of variety at hand. You can mouse-over any thumbnail to see a larger version of image used.

How About Funny Meme Cards?

You can take a meme and make it over into an ecard that you intend to send somewhere with a humorous punch. Meme, by the way, is any cultural information that spreads virally across the web. That pretty much covers everything that’s spreading across the social networks these days. The collection here is small, but you can always pick up more from YouTube and Flickr, or even upload it from your desktop.

Do-It-Yourself Ecards

What I really like about Card Karma is the minimal and clutter free interface. I really hope it stays that way (and the web app itself stays free).

The simple 4 step process starts with designing the basic layout. Card Karma gives you full range of options to customize the card and then personalize it with your own message. More often than not, you would like to go for a different choice of image or video. You can use the search tool or explore the images/videos that are already available on Card Karma.

The Card Karma search page gives you the filters to choose from. Card Karma tells you to hold your horses while it expansively trawls Flickr or YouTube.

My keyword “inspirational” netted me 4000+ images! Choose one and go ahead with thinking up a message or a greeting. You can depend on Card Karma and its library of messages too. Card Karma has basic text editing tools which help you format your message neatly.

Choosing and occasion and setting the privacy levels brings you to the first preview of the card. You can choose to keep your image and message private.

Ultimately, you land up on the page with all the share options. From email to embedding, you get to pick up the one you want. I posted mine to a friend’s wall on Facebook.

There’s lot to like about Card Karma and its neat ecards. The site may not have the razzmatazz, but it keeps things really simple. Even then, you have quite a range to be creative with. Create your own ecard and spread your wishes around. Tell us all about it in the comments.

6 Best Websites To Send Free Electronic Valentine Cards

Ryan Dube — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 16:30:59 +0000

Valentine’s Day seems to just sneak up out of nowhere, and just a day or so before it arrives, you find yourself sitting in traffic suffering from a panic attack because you just realized you forgot get the love of your life even just a simple and thoughtful Valentine card.

Well, stop panicking because MakeUseOf is here to help. So long as you have an Internet connection, you can put together a solution that will turn you from a zero to a hero in no time. The first step is to order flowers as soon as possible. Check out MissyFlowers or Flowers2Mail to start. Once you get the flowers out of the way, it’s time to choose a clever, funny or romantic card to the one that you love.

No more than a few years ago, electronic greeting cards were somewhat cheesy and anyone that received them immediately assumed that the sender was just too cheap or busy to buy the real thing. However, with the advent of social networks, more of the world is adopting the “online life” mentality.

Along with things like instant messaging and updating your social networking “status” – electronic cards have become a very normal part of everyday life. Today, it’s perfectly normal and acceptable to receive your birthday or Valentine cards electronically.

Choosing from Free Electronic Valentine Cards

I scoured the web for only the very best free electronic Valentine Card services available. In some cases, most of the cards were for purchase only, so I threw those out. In other cases, you had to install a toolbar (can you say adware?) in your browser, so I threw those out as well. What’s left is a list of the top free electronic Valentine cards services online. Pick the one that suits your situation, and you can rest assured the card will be high quality and well-received by the person you send it to.

Egreetings

Egreetings is probably one of the best e-card services online. I say this because not only is the website professionally designed and well integrated with Facebook, but because 100% of the site is absolutely free. It’s supported 100% by sponsor ads.

Not only are the cards animated and well designed, but there are also cool features you’ll discover on the site, like the tool that lets you create your own animated e-card complete with your own face integrated into the design, using either an existing picture or with your webcam.

American Greetings

One of the largest greeting card producers in the world also offers one of the best free electronic Valentine card services that you’ll find anywhere. American Greetings uses the concept of the e-card and really breaks the mold with some of the coolest ideas for an electronic Valentine. One example was an e-card that plays a really funny video of a hamster singing a love song in a low baritone voice – it’s hard to watch this video without laughing.

Then there’s this Valentine greeting, where you can type in a message, choose the type of voice, and then baby Cupid will say your programmed message to the recipient you send it to – it’s a cute way to get the message across in a way that will make the person you’re in love with smile. Most of the e-cards you’ll find here push the concept of the e-card to the limit – it’s a great site.

FunPunch

If the person that you want to send the Valentine e-card to has a great sense of humor, you just can’t go wrong with a free FunPunch animated Valentine card. Some of these cards are just hilarious. You’ll find cards with animals reciting or singing the romantic message, fake magazine covers where you can insert a face, or the most popular ones – the stripper-grams where you can insert your own face into the action, what a riot!

123Greetings

If you or the person the card is for is more of the emotional and romantic type that prefers sentiment over humor, you can’t go wrong with the Valentine’s Day section of 123Greetings. These are e-cards that feature the sort of sweet-talk you’ll find in the cards at your local store, but these also have romantic background music playing as the words slowly scroll down the screen.

I have to admit, these sort of cards make me gag – but heartfelt, romantic notes aren’t for everyone. If you’re a romantic at heart, these are the e-cards for you.

Dgreetings

Another website with the same sort of romantic e-cards is the Valentine’s Day section of DGreetings. While the site design itself leaves a little to be desired, the quality of the cards themselves is actually pretty good. You’ll find flash-based e-Cards that have well-done animated messages and background music that starts on its own and flows well with the message.

Yahoo Kids

Finally, keeping in mind that kids like to send Valentine’s Day cards too, kids can send free electronic Valentine cards over at Yahoo Kids.

These are a few cute animated cards where kids can quickly fill out names for To: and From: and send off the card via email to any of their friends. It’s an easy way for little kids to get in on the online e-card craze as well. And if you’ve ever seen the excitement on a kid’s face when they receive one of these from a friend, you’ll know it’s a great way to share the love!

Have you ever tried any of these Valentine e-card services? Do you know of any others that are just as good or better? Share your own resources in the comments section below.

Image Credit : Bernhard Aichinger

Create & Share Cool Animated Messages With WonderSay

Ryan Dube — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 00:31:03 +0000

If you’re a fan of websites like Bit.ly or Furly and the many other URL shorteners, then you will know the value of intermediate message services. Whether you’re sending a friend a cool article or posting a blog update to Twitter, URL shorteners serve up that link to your friends for you.

What if, instead of forwarding a website to a friend, you just wanted to forward a message in a creative way? Sending a free animated text message is a really cool way to draw attention to what you’re trying to say. You can send a motivational quote to a friend, a birthday or holiday greeting to your family, or you can send your blog or website readers an eye-catching message.

We’ve covered a few alternatives like this at MUO before, like 3D Text Maker or Text Anim, but these all let you create animated GIFs that you can host on your own site. What if you don’t have a website, or just don’t want to deal with the hassle? Well then head on over to Wondersay and get ready to start creating your Wondersayings.

Creating A Wondersaying

Wondersay is a brand new service where you can create an entire webpage that’s designed for the sole purpose of delivering your animated message. You don’t need to sign up for an account, and you don’t even need to offer your email. Like URL shorteners, all you have to do is use the service by typing your message into the “make a new wondersaying” box, and your animated message gets created instantly.

One trick you can use to format your animated message right off the bat is by placing a “double space” between each pause in the message. This makes each segment appear and disappear onto the screen separately, timed according to whatever your current settings are. Once you create your message, you’ll be at the customized link that’s created just for your message.

Bookmark this URL so that you can return here later to further customize the message or get the link or embed code. Sharing the message is as easy as just highlighting the entire link in the link box, copying it and sending it to friends via email. This is the fastest way to create and send fun, animated holiday messages to all of your friends.

When you click on the settings tab, you can go through each element of the animated message and change everything about it – how each section appears and disappears, the speed of the message animation, and the general theme of the web page like the background, text colors and font.

Each element has its own quick pop-up box where you can set the colors that you want in just a few simple clicks.

The easiest way to change your message significantly is by playing around with the different built-in effects. If you do this right, you could basically put together a short presentation that delivers a message to any group of people that you send the link to. It’s a great way to deliver some surprise or an inspirational message to a large group of people.

In my case, I’m running a promotion on my website, so I wanted to create a high-impact message that I could deliver via Twitter and also place on my blog. When anyone clicks on the link in an email or in Twitter, all they see is the entire webpage filled with your animated text.

The coolest part of this service, in my opinion, is the embed feature. By embedding the message, you can basically create a really cool animated ad on your website. This is exactly what I wanted to do on my site to advertise the upcoming promotion. Clicking on the embed tab, you just highlight the iframe code in the text box.

Posting that code in your sidebar, you get a high-impact instant advertisement. The only drawback is that it only scrolls through the ad once and then ends on a static page – but at least your message still appears on that last page, and people can click on the “replay” button to see it again or the “fullscreen” button to see the message in fullscreen. It’ll definitely catch the eye of your visitors.

Another nice little feature of the service is that if you want to deliver your animated message in a Twitter update, it utilizes bit.ly to shorten the URL.

This means that you can use the bit.ly monitoring feature to see how many people have clicked through your Twitter update to view your animated message. It’s a nice feature and a good way to see how much traffic your Wondersaying page is generating from Twitter.

Have you ever used Wondersay? Do you know of any other similar services? Share your insight in the comments section below.

Best Sites for Charming Greeting Card Message Ideas

Bakari Chavanu — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 18:30:59 +0000

Image and graphic design applications, such as iPhoto, Microsoft Word, The Print Shop, include dozens of attractive greeting card and postcard templates for homemade use. All you need to do is drop in a photo or two, a title, and a greeting.

But sometimes writing creative titles and messages can be a challenge, especially if you’re trying to put together a card that last minute. And while your own personal, custom message is preferable, there are a few well designed websites that can provide you some great ideas for messages.

Greeting Card Messages

By far the simplest and most straightforward site I discovered is Greeting Card Message. This resource is bare-bones, with hardly any graphics and advertising, but it contains hundreds of links to all categories of greeting card messages, including anniversaries, “get well soon”, and wedding invitations.

You can even suggest your own message to become a part of the database.

Simple messages like, “Goodbye tummy, Hello Mommy!,” “May the miracle of Christmas fill your heart with warmth and love,” may not be unique or fresh, but the site’s content can help you customize your messages to your unique occasion.

Best Card Messages

Best Card Messages is another simple straightforward site for card messages. Categories include Mother’s Day, Birthday, and Baby Card messages. The site includes both traditional and funny messages that can be copied and pasted in a template card. This is a sample birthday message from the site: “Elections come every year, and this year I am nominating you for the birthday party.”

Poemsource.com

If you looking for poetic messages, you might find some good examples at Poemsource. It features poems of Christmas, Friendships, New Years, Birthdays, and other common categories. The content is written by a writer named Karl Fuchs. Here’s an example of one of his love poem messages:

A Love Song

Let me sing you a love song
About what I feel in my heart;
Butterflies can’t find nectar
Whenever we’re apart. You’re a flower in bloom.
In the dark, in the gloom,
It’s you who brightens my day.
How many ways do I need you?
Every day, every way, come what may.

The site also provides tips for customizing your own messages.

Verses 4 Cards

Verses 4 Cards contains several dozen categories of poems, quotes, and sayings for all occasions. It also contains messages for categories not found in the above sites, including Thank You messages for teachers, funeral and sympathy poems, and even divorce messages. This site also accepts poem submissions.

Buzzle.com

Buzzle.com is not limited to card messages, but it nevertheless has a huge database of birthday, romantic, sad, inspirational, wise, and funny quotes, poems, and messages. This site is not straight forward as the ones listed above, but the content is plentiful.

Examples of its amusing birthday messages, include: “My golden words for your birthday”¦”Smile while you still have teeth!” and “Age is strictly a case of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter”

Let us know of any other sites you use for inspirational card messages. If you’re looking for free greeting applications and web services, check our list of MakeUseOf articles on this subject.

3 Sites To Make Funny Video Greeting Cards

Simon Slangen — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 17:30:12 +0000

Postage stamps and letters made out of dead trees are getting out of fashion, but (holiday) greeting cards aren’t. If you’re going to make the switch to digitalism, you’d better do it in style. A picture is said to convey a thousand words; a video all the more. Welcome to the future.

A recorded video card will bring a more personal message and show the subject that you’re willing to put effort into the occasion; more than a doodle on a store-bought card. On the practical side, you’ll even be able to save the money from purchasing the card and postage stamps.

Below are some of the best sites to record your own video greeting card. You don’t need anything besides an internet connection and a webcam connected to your computer.

BubbleJoy

BubbleJoy is my personal favorite to send video greeting cards. The service is easy to use, and hosts some of the most impressive card designs. In general, your video will be embedded in a cutout holiday-themed background. Because the BubbleJoy website can grab the video straight from your webcam, the process of making a card requires no messing around and no additional uploading.

Only recently, BubbleJoy added a Twitter sync feature. This allows you to log in with your Twitter credentials and easily share your greeting card. If you wanted to send out an original holiday greeting to your Twitter followers, this is a great way to do it.

Sharenik.com

Sharenik video cards look a lot like the traditional holiday cards, but juiced up with much technology goodness. You pick a basic card theme and template; then personalize it with pictures, a greeting text, and of course, videos. Yes, plural; you can embed up to 12 different photos or videos on a card.

The website itself does not record webcam input, but you can easily record a video on your computer using Windows Movie Maker or Photo Booth (on Mac OS X) and upload it to the website. Once you’ve changed the card fit to your liking, you can send it to its destination. Good news if you’re a particularly social being, Sharenik allows you to share your greeting with up to 500 friends!

eVCards.com

eVCards is a very plain service to create video cards, missing some of the more fancy graphics featured above. Depending on the occasion and the subject, this can actually be a good thing. The cutout holiday designs are fun and relate more to the original holiday greetings, with bright colors and simple graphics. Young children, especially, will love these cards.

One of the most impressing features of eVCards is the ability to choose between uploading a file from your computer like Sharenik does, or recording it on the spot like BubbleJoy does. Once finished, you can not only send, but also embed the video on your own website.

When did you last record or send a video greeting card to your friends and family? Let us know what you think about these websites in the comments below!

Picture Credit: Shutterstock

5 Free Last Minute Greetings & Gift Ideas

Tina Sieber — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:31:12 +0000

So you totally forgot to get a birthday present for a good friend or send a Christmas card to a close relative? The time for a punctual delivery has passed and you’re in a mess. What can you do?

Well, let’s hope they have internet access because that could save your rear end. You can still prepare a lovely surprise and send it to them in time. After all, a virtual delivery is instant.

Best of all, the following last minute gift ideas are all free, at least for the moment. Gifts don’t have to be expensive, it’s the thought that counts.

1. Greeting Card

The most obvious last minute gift idea would be to send an electronic greeting card. There are many sites out there that offer free templates. Hallmark and Yahoo! Greetings now charge for eCards. Free eCards can be sent with sites such as 123Greetings & eGreetings.

Care2

The mission of Care2 is to support people living a healthy and green lifestyle. Their free eCards are of a very high quality with unique designs and animations. You can personalize your card, have it sent on a specific date, and receive a notification when it was picked up.

As a member of Care2, you will collect butterfly credits for each greeting card and you can redeem the credits for meaningful gifts, such as safe drinking water or carbon offsets. What a great way to salve your conscience.

YouTube Holiday Cards

If you’re not a shy person and up for fun, why not produce a little video and surprise someone? Saikat wrote an article on how to Send Video Greeting Cards with YouTube.

2. Virtual Flowers

Greeting cards are all the same. Flowers, however, express a different message, even if they are only virtual. Virtual Florist and eFlowerGrams provide a wonderful selection.

flowers2mail

By far the most original virtual flowers can be sent with flowers2mail. You can arrange an individual bouquet, select a vase, and fill in a little greeting card. Et voilÃ , your flowers are ready to be mailed, up to 15 days in advance.

3. Calendar

It’s not difficult to make a calendar. All you need is a free online tool, some unique motifs, and Adobe Acrobat Reader to open and print your calendar.

strong>My Calendar Maker

To create a free personalized calendar, you have to register with the site. You can choose between different calendar layouts (full-size, half-size, tear-off), pick the start month/year and end month/year, upload your images, add captions of up to 100 characters, add or remove special occasions, for example birthdays and anniversaries, add a cover and a title, and finally save and print your calendar. Quick and very easy.

The creators also offer My Free Calendar Maker, which creates non-personalized calendars. With the Yearly Calendar Maker, you can create a personalized yearly calendar. The advantage of both tools is that you don’t have to sign up.

4. Gift Certificate

Using a gift certificate you can give one of the most precious gifts of all: time.

Invite your friend for a home cooked dinner and spend an entire evening with them; offer your grandma to stock up her supplies, so that she doesn’t need to go shopping as often or carry heavy items; volunteer to mow the lawn of your parents’ house once a month; or help your friends with babysitting the kids and/or pets, so they can spend some time alone.

To make your job easier, you can use ready-made templates and fill them in with your details.

Ivy’s Gift Certificate Maker

The beauty of this gift certificate maker is that it provides you with a list of ideas of what you can possibly give. So simply tick an option in one of the gift giving categories (kids to parents, parents to kids, friends to friends etc.), add the recipient’s and your name, and preview the result.

This tool also suggests to make a coupon book, i.e. printing multiple certificates and stapling them together. This can make a lovely gift.

Regiftable Personalized Gift Certificate

Need it custom and chic, but very simple and most of all fast? On this site you can choose from five seasonal templates and create up to three certificates at once. They will look like the example below. Quick and easy.

You can either print each certificate or save and mail them.

5. Music Playlist

If you want to make a very personal and instant gift, think of the music that connects you and your friend or relative. Every life, friendship, and relationship has its own soundtrack. Or maybe you know someone who loves to discover new music.

You can sit down and record a CD or tape. There are some simpler options though. You can create an online playlist on several different sites.

Actionext

This site provides a simple way to produce playlists without having to sign in. Simply search for songs, from the results list click the plus next to a song to add it and continue to search. Once down click Save and share the URL.

I reviewed this tool in my article Create Online Music Playlists with Actionext.

MixTape.me

To create and share a permanent playlist with MixTape.me you have to get an account and sign in. But once you have passed that point you’re set to create something awesome. You could make several playlists with different purposes. For example one to cheer up a friend, another to let your family drown in happy memories, and a third to show everyone which music you love best.

David has written a thorough review on how to Build The Perfect Music Playlist With MixTapeMe.

Have you completed your gift shopping yet? What are some last minute gifts you still need to pick up? Did you come up with a great last minute gift idea that would fit in this list? Please share!

Image credits: zerobug

7 Great & Free Disney E-Cards Websites

Ryan Dube — Sat, 09 May 2009 20:35:44 +0000

A popular form of communication on the web is the act of sending a friend or relative an e-card, or email card. One of the most popular card designs are free Disney e-cards. These are so popular, that entire websites are now available where visitors can search for and send just free Disney e-cards. However, like many other things that are free on the web, the search results are filled with poorly designed web pages, or sites that are filled with adware. The following are the top 10 sites for Disney fanatics that offer free cards with the best designs and are easiest to use.

Seven of The Best Free Disney E-Cards Websites

The following sites are all focused exclusively on Disney. There are Disney fans from around the world who’ve become obsessed with all things Disney, and many of these websites offer more than just free Disney email cards ““ they also offer things like clipart, forums, park or movie information and more. Most importantly, they let you send some of the coolest e-cards featuring Disney themes to anyone in the world.

#1 ““ DisneySites

This is one of sites that’s obviously created and run by a Disney fan. At DisneySites , you’ll find clipart, movie information, forums, park information and of course e-cards. On the page for the cards, I counted a total of 103 cards currently available, with my favorite being the 4 within the “characters” category.

These appear to be actual photos taken at the Disney Park itself, but they are high resolution and the cards are well laid out. You can even schedule when the card gets delivered by clicking on “Send Later on”¦” and entering the date. Just beware that the site does feature camouflaged Google Ads, so if you don’t want to mistakenly get transported to a commercial site, be wary of where you click.

#2 ““ A Hidden Disney Gem: I-Love-Disney

Easily one of the most obscure e-card sites on the Internet, I-Love-Disney is horribly designed and has a format that’s so busy and overrun with links that it’s nearly impossible to navigate. With that said, if you can find the email cards section, you’ll agree that this site is easily the one free Disney e-cards websites you’ll come across with a huge volume of great Disney graphics.

There are pros and cons to using this site. The animated graphics are cool, but the site isn’t automated. You need to copy the image itself and paste it into an email, so there’s no fancy formatting or form that will send the card for you. On the flip side, there’s a feature to select from dozens of languages across the world, and again, the selection of graphics is impressive.

#3 ““ The eCards Disney Widget

While I normally wouldn’t include a site like this on a top ten list, only because there’s not a whole lot that sets it apart from the thousands of other e-card sites on the net, except there is one pretty cool marketing tool that the creator of eCards.ac used that’s fairly useful ““ a Disney E-card Widget that you can place on your website to offer your visitors access to these free cards.

The widget is hosted and offered at WidgetBox . Keep in mind that the designs are decidedly “feminine,” so if you’re looking for manly Disney e-cards (if there’s such a thing), you may want to skip this site. However, if you’re into soft and flowery graphics, you’ll have a field day with these free Disney e-cards.

#4 – Lilo & Stitch E-Cards

With just about every form of media, few people can pull it off as well as Disney. This makes sense given the sheer resources available to the media design teams. However, there’s something above-and-beyond when it comes to Disney’s own offerings, and Disney websites are no exception. The Lilo & Stitch section of the Disney Channel’s website offers kids (and maybe the kid-at-heart) some pretty cool “digital post cards” that they can send to a friend.

The offerings are a bit slim. I count about five to seven, but the designs are very cool and a few of them are animated as well.

#5 ““ Mission Space Digital Postcards

If this top 10 list was in order of coolness, I would place the website for Mission Space at the very top. That may only be because I’m a bit biased as I love all things related to space, but the graphics and sound effects on this website are excellent.

The link for the digital postcards you can send to friends is found at the lower left hand corner of the page, if you can get past all of the other awesome stuff download ““ like screensavers, wallpapers and even posters.

#6 ““ Pirates of the Caribbean, Dead Man’s Mail

The site for the movie Pirates of the Caribbean easily competes with the Mission Space site for first place. On this site you can actually send free voice e-mail messages using a pirate voice. When you first enter the site, you can choose from one of four languages ““ English, Dutch, Italian or Spanish.

This is honestly one of the coolest e-card sites I’ve found on the net, and for the geeks out there, you’ve got a choice between text-to-speech technology, using a phone, or using pre-recorded selections. Keep in mind that this site is very heavy on the Flash side, so make sure you’re fully updated or it won’t work.

#7 ““ Home on The Range Digital Postcards

Finally, for fans of the Disney movie Home on the Range, there’s the movie website on Disney.com where, if you click on “games & downloads,” you can select from and send your friends a free digital postcard featuring one of the movie’s goofy characters.

Oh, and when you’re visiting most of these official Disney sites, really crank up the volume if you want to fully enjoy the experience.

Do you know of any other fun or interesting Disney themed e-card websites out there? Share your own favorite sites in the comments section below.

How To Create Your Own E-Greeting Card Website

Wendy Limauge — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 23:01:23 +0000

E-cards are a fun way of staying in touch with friends, co-workers and family. 123 Greetings, the online authority in free e-greetings, offers a free associates program which allows you to add an e-greeting card site to your existing website.

It is designed for webmasters who would like to have a greeting card site of their own without having to write the programs to create one. After you register, they will send you one line of HTML code to insert on your website and you’re all set to go.

Having an ecard site can give your website more traffic that will help you generate extra income. You will have total control over it all and in fact, the average user will see it as a complete ecard program managed by you. You can personalize the site by using your own images, midifiles, quotations and background.

You can see detailed statistics of your page usage including your daily card creation, daily visitors to your ecard site, your rank in the 123 Greetings system and lots more. They will also email you the log files.

Here are the 4 easy steps to setup your own E-greeting card website:

Create an account by visiting the 123 Greetings Associates website.
Insert the HTML tag into your website.
Customize your e-mail text.
Customize your card page.

With your free 123 Greetings site you can:

Offer your visitors more than 20,000 online greeting cards
Customize your greeting cards site with your own logo, background colors and text
Add your own images, midi files and quotations
Earn revenue through your e-card site
View your detailed statistics online to track your site’s performance

Here is an example of a landing page you might create. This page would be linked to your 123 Greetings card site. You can create any type of page on your existing site you like to match your existing design and then just link to your 123 Greeting card main page.

A visitor would pick greeting cards from many categories. Here is an example of some of the cards in the Birthday category.

Greeting cards can either be flash or static. Here is an example of a Flash greeting card. It has a button so the recipient can turn the music on and off. This is a non-working sample.

The visitor to your 123 Greetings website would fill out this form to send the card. This is a non-working sample form.

Don’t have a website?

Check out this MakeUseOf article to learn how to create a free website with no annoying ads.

Do you run an e-card site like this? If so, what are your experiences with it?

Send Video Greeting Cards with YouTube’s Holiday Cards

Saikat Basu — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:01:06 +0000

Tired of the run of the mill e-cards that seem to be flying around every festive season? Do you want to wrap your wish in a different package this year? Then head over to YouTube to send a video greeting card.

For the second year in a row YouTube is offering a greetings channel for sending personalized video cards. If you weren’t among the millions who tried it last year, here’s another chance. With 2008 about to take its curtain call, YouTube is back with its “˜Holiday Video Cards’. The only difference seems to be that you have more themes and videos to choose from.

To turn a video into a season ending greeting, sign-up at YouTube.
Pick out the video of choice from the ones featured courtesy the YouTube community.
Pick a theme. Themes are like e-card backgrounds. There seem to be only seven themes now.
Compose your personal message (upto 230 characters only) and add the addresses of the recipients (maximum 25 at one time). Now, click “˜Send’ to spread the cheer.
If you want to send one of your own, just record one with your webcam. The AudioSwap feature is enabled for your personally created videos. It lets you add audio/musical tracks from the YouTube AudioSwap catalog. The catalog has now included many holiday themed tracks.
Though the featured videos seem to be more geared for the holiday season, you can send any video on YouTube as a video greeting. Every video has been given a “˜send as a greeting card’ link.

In conclusion, it’s a nice way to send video greetings within YouTube itself. I only wish YouTube had included a “date to send” option to allow us to time our wishes better. Oh yes, choose a nice user name to log-in because it’s what goes into the card.

Did you try YouTube’s holiday greetings last year or this year? What do you think about this seasonal feature?