My Anti-Valentine

"Valentine's Day is like herpes: just when you think its gone for good, it rears its ugly head once more. No wonder some people prefer to call it VD.

Yes, it's that special time of year when chocolate manufacturers and greetings card companies encourage you to demonstrate the extent of your fondness in cold, hard, cash (or the satin-covered equivalent) on February 14th.

Fuck that.

This year, celebrate or commiserate by sending an anti-valentine. Stick two fingers (or one, if you're that way culturally inclined) at any organisation with a vested interest which prescribes how and when to show your feelings. This year, don't say it with flowers: say it with bile."

Source: Meish

"What’s all this about, then?
The idea of the site is to provide an alternative card-sending service for all the people who think Valentine’s Day is sickly-sweet, exclusively coupley, consumerist nonsense or otherwise a bit naff.

Who’s behind this site? How long has this been going? How did you come up with the idea?
The original VD cards were created by me (Meg Pickard) and David Pannett when we were both single and grumpy while sharing a flat in London and working in new media. We created a bunch of cynical cards poking fun at the cutesy commercialism of the day, to send to our friends, with slogans like “Destined to die alone and unloved in a room heavy with the tang of cat wee” and “Oh my god. Thirty and still single.” They were just downloads, really, but we had fun making them.

The next year, we did it again, only this time we added an automatic send function – a free thing, supported by ads. Not great, but about the limits of our technical knowledge at the time. We were surprised how popular they were – a couple of thousand sent!

In 2003, we redesigned and ran the site again, this time with an ad-free back end. Over a two week period, more than 30,000 cards were sent. In 2004 the total grew again, to nearly 100K. In 2005, the number of cards sent soared past the 200K mark before the server collapsed under the strain. And so the pattern continued: lots of traffic, lots of technology fail.

Every year saw a substantial revamp of both cards and back-end functionality in an effort to keep on top of demand. 

In 2009, I decided that sending things by email was
a) too much hassle (in terms of being exploited by spambots and the like, plus causing my lovely hosts at Pair to have palpitations once a year) and
b) like, sooooo 2005. Who uses email anymore for sending stuff around the internet? Quite.

So it was reborn in early February 2009 with a social webtools spin, so people can share the love (and spread VD) via facebook, twitter, digg or anything else."

Source: Meish