Running High: Emotions and Web Traffic

Crush of Card Senders Caused Some Valentine's Sites to Crash

This is what passes for modern romance: An e-mail shows up in a cluttered inbox. A stream of animated ants pours down a hill the color of bubblegum. The insects line up in heart formation.

"You hold a special place in my heart," say the pixels.

Probably it's best that Shakespeare is dead.

America's enthusiasm for digital love has become strong enough to temporarily crash the sites of several online greeting-card companies yesterday and make others exceed their projections for the day.

"It's been an unbelievable amount of traffic," said Rachel Bolton, a spokeswoman for Hallmark Cards Inc., whose overwhelmed Web site went down several times yesterday. "It's a phenomenon of our culture, I think."

At its peak, Cleveland's American Greetings Corp. had 500,000 people an hour send Internet Valentines through its sites, including BlueMountain.com. Sally Babcock, senior vice president of the company's interactive division, expected 5 million e-cards to be sent, but is "99 percent sure" that mark was passed yesterday, its busiest day of the year.

Even an anti-Valentine's Day site -- a haven for the single and cynical that compares the holiday to a certain, unpleasant sexually transmitted disease -- was bombarded.

"While it's lovely to have you stop by, basically too many synchronous requests to the card-sending functionality has caused the server to bork," wrote Meg Pickard, author of Meish.org, a blog that publishes anti-Valentine's Day cards. Pickard's site crashed twice yesterday, and she had to beg her Web-hosting company to put the site back online, promising the heavy volume would last only one day.

What the rise of e-cards hasn't done is diminish the popularity of old-fashioned paper cards. For the past five years, the number of traditional Valentine's Day cards purchased in the United States has held steady at about 190 million, according to the Greeting Card Association. (Incidentally -- harrumph -- about 85 percent of those cards are bought by women.)

"I think because people are e-mailing so much, they're connected to a lot more people than they were 10 years ago," said Valerie Cooper, executive vice president of the association. "The fact that e-card sites are crashing, it's not a reflection of people not giving paper cards."

Speed and efficiency surely contribute to the appeal of e-cards, but so does variety. The card section at CVS might not contain the same sentiments one could find at http://hipstercards.com/ or http://virtualinsults.com/ .

Some sites have even begun charging for e-cards. American Greetings charges $13.99 for a yearly subscription that allows customers to send all the digital birthday bunnies and Groundhog's Day greetings they wish. The company's interactive unit generated $68 million in revenue in the first three quarters of 2005.

But etiquette gurus warn that society shouldn't take its Web affair with e-cards too far.

St. Patrick's Day? Yes.

Fat Tuesday? Sure.

Death of a loved one? Only if you're trying to sever a friendship.

In romance, the e-card is even trickier, according to Diana Kirshner, a psychologist and self-proclaimed "love expert." It can be cute, she says, or fatal.

"If there is very little nurturance, affection, loving coming across to you and an e-card is sent, it comes across as a last-minute crumb thrown in your face," Kirshner said. "It's just going to backfire."

Amen.