This isn’t new. The U.S. Postal Service tried this a while back, discovered that some people wanted to put naughty things on stamps, and promptly shut the service down (I think they called it a “trial”; good save guys!). After some subsequent buzz surrounding other postal customization services, they apparently took notice and restarted their own service, and before long vendor Photostamps popped up in the news offering custom stamps.

That’s now month’s-old ancient history. But surfing over to Yahoo’s homepage just now I was hit with an ad for their service and thought I’d call attention to it… as if I need to do that, the ad is pretty in-your-face. I’m guessing Yahoo is working directly with the USPS, so I feel kinda bad for the Photostamp people. I’d imagine Yahoo is going to pwn them in short order. And what a clever way to get people using their image hosting services.

None of this of course is to be confused with the We Stamp U service (a German company that provides custom-stamped postcards and who iirc extended their service to the U.S. prior to the USPS service restart). But I wonder if the We Stamp U folks have figured out that they need to offer something more custom. After all, which would you prefer: putting your custom stamp on your own mail, or having your custom stamp only on a limited range of post cards? I need to keep an eye on them and see how they adjust.