I don't know, you wait the best part of a decade for the personalised greetings card market to take off, then along come two new entrants in the space of a couple of months.

First the mighty Marks & Spencer decided to muscle in on Moonpig's market, now new entrant Whamoosh wants to get in on the act too.

Moonpig has of course done all the legwork and heavy lifting in this particular space, and is now reaping the rewards - it was interesting to learn from the firm's founder Nick Jenkins that despite spending on TV advertising and digital marketing, most of its new business is acquired through word-of-mouth, or rather card-in-hand, because recipients love the cards they receive so much that they then order for their friends and family, and so on. Meanwhile, Marks & Spencer has the advantage of being able to promote its new card service to gazillions of existing customers on the back of its massive online presence.

My initial reaction to news of the Whamoosh offering was that it would need to have something pretty special to make headway against two such formidable competitors. Its USP is the Facetec technology behind its "Face-it!" cards. Facebook users familiar with the "Yearbook Yourself" application will be familiar with this type of thing. I created a Face-it! Card this morning using my standard issue PrintWeek pic, and while it worked OK (there's quite a long wait while the image is uploaded and processed initially, but after that it's pretty quick), the facial morphing was perhaps a bit too good, in that you couldn't really tell it was me anymore. Having shown the resulting image to someone who should be able to recognise me at a distance of less than three feet, the response was "who's that?". I'll dig out a less bland pic later and try again. But given suitably characterful subject matter I can see that these cards will certainly appeal to young folk and what could be described as the whoopee cushion sector of the market.

It's interesting that Whamoosh is partnering with trade printer Wirralco for the print production side of things. Must find out what web-to-print setup they're using too. Also interesting will be how they promote this and establish their brand - I imagine the whole social networking side of things will play a big part, I see they're on Twitter but can't find them on Facebook just yet. I see that it's also possible to upload images directly from Facebook and Flickr, which is bound to have appeal.

Yet again, though, we see an example of printed matter being generated via a website, and this is a trend that the industry at large needs to keep on top of. The expectations of customers for all types of print services are going to change as a result.

See also Red letter, or rather card day; and Simple M&S card not-so-simple after all.