Apple iCards

» see icards.mac.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

icards never reached me at any scale that mattered. it was a mac.com product, american in distribution and apple in audience, at a moment when the only mac in my ankara neighborhood was a g3 imac somebody had imported and kept under a dust cover. the e-greeting category as a whole was an early-internet thing the english-speaking web cared about more than the turkish web ever did, we got our birthday wishes by sms and msn nudges, not by clicking a glossy themed image hosted on someone else's server.

icards arrived january 5, 2000 as part of itools, the free @mac.com bundle steve jobs introduced at macworld san francisco. itools shipped with a small group of web services, the @mac.com email account and the iDisk online folder being the headline pair, with icards riding alongside. the pitch on icards was simple. you signed in to mac.com on the web, then you browsed apple's collection of professionally photographed images sorted by category. you typed a short message and picked a typeface from a small set designed to look like handwriting. you sent the result by email to any address you wanted.

the receiver did not need a mac. they did not need any apple account. they got an email with a link, opened it in any browser, and saw a webpage version of the card with apple's photo and your message. that was the entire service. it was a free vector of brand awareness for the @mac.com domain, since every card sent put apple's url and apple's photography into someone else's inbox. itools became paid.mac in 2002 at $99 a year, but icards stayed free for everyone, even people without an apple account.

~ the record ~

~ what the cards looked like ~

apple commissioned the photo library from working photographers and kept the rotation reasonably fresh through the early.mac years. the categories drifted with the seasons, valentine's photography in february giving way to halloween jack-o-lanterns by october. the layout was always the same. a full-bleed photo sat on top with your typed message rendered in one of a handful of script fonts below. there was no animation and no music. the card was a still image, sized for the dial-up era, that loaded quickly even on the slow connections of 2001.

~ the long tail ~

when apple announced the mobileme transition in june 2008, the email to.mac members listed the features that would not survive the move. icards was on the list. the official goodbye took the form of a final e-card themed for the occasion, sent to members through the same icards interface. on july 9, 2008 the icards.mac.com address stopped resolving and apple posted a help article suggesting customers use the photo-mailing feature inside apple mail instead. that was the closest thing to a replacement, send a photo as an email attachment with a stationery template. it covered the same surface area. it did not cover the brand-aware web link that had made icards small but persistent for eight years.

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