Happy Birthday (email alerts)

Today is my birthday, and the last thing I expected was an email phenomenon. But as soon as my wife reminded me this morning, I found a variety of "Happy Birthday" emails from various social networks in my inbox. No, not from people in those networks, but from the automated alert systems. Several were surprisingly tailored to me.

My favorite has got to be from "Where Are You Now" (wayn.com), because the name suggests the midlife crisis I'm avoiding. (It's actually a travel site.)

Flickr wished me a "glitter-filled day," linking to user contributed content (example image above).

Thinking about how birthday alerts SHOULD work, there's always Plaxo: addressbook integration across Gmail, Yahoo, AIM, Outlook, etc -- with built-in 2-week reminders of birthdays for anyone you have a date for. It also offers electronic cards, and will send them on the right day.

Unfortunately, the 2 experiences I've had with Plaxo were... probably user error:
1.) I wished a colleague a birthday 2 weeks ahead of the actual day (and he was quite uncomfortable with it, since neither he nor I could figure out how Plaxo got the date in the first place),
2.) Plaxo wished *me* a happy birthday last week, stating it was the 16th (it's the 21st) (...increasingly unhelpful as I age).

My Great Grandpa lived to be 96, and talked about the first car he ever saw. I figure I've got about 55 more years of these birthday alerts. It will be interesting to see where it goes from here.