On Saturday, I had received an email-advertisement for an online e-card generator hosted by jibjab.com. It is a holiday ecard named “elf-yourself”. You upload photos of you and family and friends. You then stick your uploaded faces onto their website and they transfer them to a bunch of dancing elves. You can select the type of dance that the elves perform. In the background there is a holiday jingle to wish your recipient a happy Christmas.
After I successfully made the ecard, I showed it to my children. My 10-year-old daughter wanted to make one of her own. I helped her load the pictures onto the computer and she skillfully cropped the faces so they fit well on the elves. She was so proud of her newly created e-card that she posted it on our family blog.
When I first watched her e-card it was very cute and I told her she did a good job. Later that day, she tried to show the card to one of her friends. However, we found that the e-card would not load properly. It almost appeared as if the e-card had expired.
The next day I received an e-mail as well as a comment from that blog post. People were upset by the content of the e-card. I loaded the blog post up into my browser and sure enough I found the content of the card to be different than what my daughter had originally created. In fact, it was somewhat obscene. It was definitely inappropriate for a 10-year-old girl as well as all of her friends that she sent a card to. In the place of her card, was a Valentines Day greeting — a striptease that someone else had created in jest for a friend.
Somehow, the unique key associated with my daughter’s card expired early (within the day) and someone else’s card took the newly available key. Thus, the card that we intended to share with everyone else no longer existed — instead they would receive a card that was definitely inappropriate and offensive.
Luckily, jibjab.com allows you to purchase your flash file (e-card) for about four dollars. This way you can ensure that the card you made is going to be the card that your recipients receive. I am not angry at jibjab.com for this mixup – I am sure was just a random technological foul-up. But it has taught me a lesson — as long as your information is hosted by someone else, on someone else’s server, you can never truly be sure of it’s presented result.
So, don’t thow out the paper greeting cards just yet — ecards may look fancy and fun, but you just never know what your recipient will end up seeing!
