Matt Brezina, the co-founder of Xobni, an application that makes using Microsoft Outlook a much more pleasant experience by doing various things such as making a decent search engine available and grouping your messages, has just come back from several months of traveling to announce his latest startup: Postagram. It’s a very simple app, iPhone only for the moment, that allows you to use your Instragram credentials to send a postcard to anyone in the world for just $0.99. That’s it. That’s all it does. We’d be more impressed if it the exact same thing wasn’t done ages ago, all the way back in May 2009, by a UK company called Touchnote. They’ve not only got an iPhone application, but one for Nokia’s Symbian platform, Google’s Android, Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, and even HP’s webOS! Sure, their personalized greeting cards cost a bit more, $1.50, but they include a small Google Maps image of where you were when you sent that special someone said card.
The bigger question here is do people really share photos with each other anymore in the traditional sense that they hand others physical goods? An email with a few attachments may not have the same impact as a glossy print, but it’s faster, easier, and if the person doesn’t want your photos then they just die in a server farm. Not a tree was harmed during the entire process. And forget about email, what about Facebook? Everyone’s on it and even your mother uses it to share photos of her vacations in Europe.
You tell us, would you use a service like this? What kind of relationship would you have to have with a person for them to warrant getting a card in the post? If they’re that special then wouldn’t you rather get your photos printed at your local supermarket and then mail it to them yourself with a hand written note, or better yet drop the photos off in person?