Yandex.Otkrytki

» see cards.yandex.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Anyone who was online around 2000 remembers the e-card, whatever country they were in. You went to a site, picked an animated picture off a grid, typed a line under it, and the other person got a link in their inbox that opened a page with a MIDI file playing. In Turkey on a 56k modem this was a genuine event, because it was one of the few things you could send that was not plain text. I sent them. Everybody sent them. Nobody kept them.

Yandex launched its version in 2000, when Russia's portal war was young and every service worth having had to exist inside the portal rather than beside it. Открытки put the greetings on the project's own front page, which is a detail worth sitting with: the cards were public by default, a wall of strangers wishing strangers happy birthday.

Version 2.0 arrived in 2006 with a redesign and a partner program, and from 2007 you could send any photograph out of your own Yandex.Fotki collection as a card. That is the sensible evolution of the idea and also the beginning of its end, because once the picture can be your picture, the site is just a mailer with clip art you no longer need.

~ the dossier ~

~ what an e-card actually was ~

The format solved a problem that stopped existing. Email in 2000 was text, attachments were slow and frequently rejected by the receiving mailbox, and almost nobody had a way to put an image in front of someone else. The e-card was a hosted page that did the hard part for you, and the melody was the selling point, because sound on a web page was still a novelty rather than an irritation.

What killed the category was not a competitor. It was that the container the greeting had to travel in kept getting better until the container was enough on its own. By the time Открытки closed, a Russian wanting to wish somebody a happy New Year had VKontakte and a phone that could send the photograph itself.

~ the quiet part ~

Yandex did not announce the closure. There was no farewell post and no explanation, and nothing was offered to whoever had thirteen years of cards sitting on the front page. The Russian tech press noticed after the fact and filed it into the growing list of Yandex projects that had been closed or quietly replaced by something else.

The date is the part that stays with me. New Year is the card holiday in Russia, the way that nothing else quite is. The service shut on 27 December, four days before the night it had been built for, after thirteen consecutive years of being useful on exactly that night. Someone inside Yandex looked at the traffic and concluded that even the last good week of the year was not worth keeping the lights on for.

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