ARTICLES

Laugh Riots: Funny Ecards
By: Herbert Reich

E-cards are what electronic greeting cards are called. E-cards usually involve images and pictures being put together with personal messages and sent by email. When you compare e-cards to paper cards, they are more versatile, because they are digitally generated content, which means that you can send to more than one recipient at a time. There are many ways to personalize them and then they can be saved to a file in the computer or a portable media storage device. When you think of environmentally friendly you think of e-cards too because no paper is used when designing or mailing them.

The e-cards had their beginning at the same time the Internet started. One e-card site called E-Cards.com started the e-cards which featured wildlife and nature photos in the year 1995. Then the following year in February, the e-cards were popular especially for Valentine's Day and these were offered by Sony Entertainment and Infobahn.com. E-cards kept growing in popularity through the late 1990s and into the new millennium, and was found to be a very lucrative Internet business. BlueMountain.com is still known to be one of the most successful and largest of the websites that offer free e-cards. Most of the time e-cards are available for free and are hugely popular to this day. Also many of the e-cards sites also offer paid memberships that offer customers premium e-cards, also some sites charge a monthly or yearly fee for sending e-cards.

Ecards started as postcards, using non-moving or static images. These images are accompanied with personalized greeting messages. Then, ecards evolved into flash animation. Flash animation is based on 2-dimensional vector animation, which used scripting language. The flash animation is more cartoon-style, but can be realistic and advanced. Ecards with flash animation usually contain soundtrack, with speech and music or audio sounds. One example is a wedding ecard with the sound of church bells. Flash animation can include interactivity, for example, recipient can click on an image of a wrapped present to reveal a greeting message. Nowadays, flash animated ecards are still one of the most commonly used formats.

Video e-cards have become another form of e-cards. Through video and text combined these video cards are able to convey a greeting messages for the recipient. The video e-cards require more production time, people as actors and a budget. A cheaper and simpler way to method for sending e-cards is utilizing your cell phone to send mobile e-cards. Cell phone users first need to download the e-cards to the phones via WAP through their networks. Then these e-cards can be sent to the other users of the cell phones through MMS. Mgreetings, which is a Dutch company, created mobile e-cards in 2003. The users of mobile phones will have to check if they have to pay for the e-cards it just depends on the provider of the mobile service.

These e-cards are usually sent to mark or celebrate a variety of occasions. Some of the more popular occasions are weddings, Christmas, birthdays, Mother's Day, friendship, Valentine's Day, and so on. Many sites also offer several funny and humorous e-cards. These humorous or funny e-cards usually use animated characters and add to them funny sounds along with your personalized messages. Funny e-cards have been designed for everyone and all occasions, for example, humorous political, office jokes, even funny Christmas greeting e-cards. Along with e-cards being great everyone, any occasion, or at anytime, they are also friendly to the environment.

Help someone special laugh today by sending funny ecards left and right. Nothing says you care like a funny ecard.