Postcardly (currently in beta) is a new digital service that will convert an email with an attached photo into a postcard (email content on back, photo on front) and send it to your designated recipient via the US Postal Service. Promoted as a way to keep in touch with friends and family who don't use computers (grandparents are mentioned a lot) it also seems to have caught on with military families.
Postcardly is a relevant discovery for me; as it happens my current to-do list includes curating a batch of digital photos from a recent family visit, uploading them to Snapfish, ordering doubles on select prints for my grandmother, and then sending said prints to her via USPS—a process which all told requires a couple of man hours (plus the waiting time between each step), the fees associated with Snapfish and the cost of postage. So I understand the hassles involved when sharing things from the digital age with someone firmly rooted in a non-digital world.
While I decided not to try Postcardly for this latest undertaking (at 99¢ a postcard it isn't practical for sending batches of prints), it does combine two of my great loves: postcards and communicating the old-fashioned way.
One downside: There aren't any clear examples on the website that show the format of the back, what typeface is used, etc. This might seem a little designer nitpicky, but if handwriting (one of the personal touches of the traditional postcard) is going to be replaced, I want to see how—and be sure Comic Sans hasn't infiltrated my communications.
But all in all, Postcardly offers a simple and useful service, for which there appears to be a market, while throwing some much-needed business to the desperate USPS to boot. I'll be interested to see how it progresses.
(Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Postcard Club of NYC)