Let's face it, the main thing that comes with social services, are Friends - which is always a nice thing to have of course, but now with so many virtual friends from everywhere in the globe, it's almost unavoidable to find easier ways to congratulates them all on their birthday.
The best solution will be to go to their Facebook profile, and write something on the wall. You can even go further more and buy your friend a gift (yeah, I know you'll go for the free ones - that's also FINE).
However, if you got bored with that, and you're looking for some creative ways to put a smile on your friend face on their special day, here's a list of tips and tools (and other goodies), that may help you succeed with that.
First thing first, you'll need a good alert service that will notify you about all this important birthday dates.
Remime is a reminder service designed to make your life easier by tenfold. It is a simple tool for use as a calendar, that will urge you about BD dates in advance.
With Birthday-time management, you actually send your friends email so they'll enter their birthday dates into your calendar. Then you receive your friends' birthday alerts into your email account.
Send
cute icon gifts to your friend mobile phone(s): Just fill in your name and the phone number, or email address of the person you want to send a gift to. You can add a personal message as well.
You don't need to register to send a gift.
Pingg allows you to design and send uniquely personalized online invitations for your upcoming event. The combination of easy-to-use design tools, a large selection of pre-designed invitations, and library of over 2 million unique images, create stylish and good-looking invitations for any event.
GroupCard (also known as SquidNote) is really awesome if you like to surprise your friends. The service helps you create a card and circulate it to other people to sign (around the office, classmates, friends, family etc.,). Everyone adds a special message to the card and it gets e-delivered to a lucky recipient.
GroupCard also owns the poplar
Birthday Alert application on
Facebook.
Another collaborative card application is
Tribbit - An easy to use service that lets you start a birthday card (or any other event card), gather photos, words, voice messages and more, pass it among family and friends, then send it to the person who celebrate. Watch
Demo.
Rattlebox has some pretty weird (ok, lets say unusual) video cards that you can quickly send to friends by email, copy-paste a URL, or simply embed it in your blog.
Again, you don't need to register to send a video.
Birthday Songs are always a nice tribute to give & receive. I picked
Songza because it is really easy to search, find and share a song through this service. You don't need to sign-up to be able to do it, just search your desirable song and share it with your dear ones, via link, email, or directly to
Twitter.
flowers 2 mail - If you're looking for a special and sweet e-card, use this service. Choose a vase, write a card and send your free virtual bouquet by email to your friend, girlfriend, boss, grandmother etc - for any occasion.
They're Beautiful - Very similar to the service before (flowers2mail), only here, you just need to pick your favorite bouquet, add your greeting, and send it to anyone you want.
Just a quick and fun way to surprise your friends -
Create and share fortune cookies with
Kookies.it (150 characters for each fortune).
The
Giftoscope helps to choose a present in an off-the-wall way. Just think of a person you want to make a present to and point out a few proper features. The Giftoscope will immediately offer gift variants.
*The cake image above, created by
this generator.
