INTERNET Prank Web site forces stamp company to issue restrictions

The company's trial with the Postal Service is to end next week.
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON -- It seemed like a clever idea. This summer, a small Web company, Stamps.com, partnered with the U.S. Postal Service to let people put their own photos on 37-cent first-class stamps.
Cute babies. Precious pets. Proud papas. The plan was to give regular folks a novel way to send their party invitations, letters, and thank-you notes.
Except this is the online world, where good intentions are forever being hijacked. E-mail once seemed to be a convenient way to pass notes back and forth -- until spammers figured out how to commandeer the system to deliver loads of unsolicited advertising. Message boards for high-minded discourse? They're also a handy place to swap pornographic images.
And so it came to pass that Stamps.com Inc.'s experiment became the target of pranksters at a Web site called the Smoking Gun, which ordered images such as convicted spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Monica Lewinsky's famously stained Gap dress and notorious war criminals.
Restrictions
In no time, Stamps.com began restricting what images were permissible. The company will now accept only "color images of children who appear to be age 12 or younger, pets and animals, business and charity logos, landscapes, wildlife and vehicles," according to a notice on the Stamps.com site.
The company's trial with the Postal Service is scheduled to end next week, and the Postal Service is not saying whether it will continue to program.
Santa Monica, Calif.-based Stamps.com is just about the last of the dot-com-era companies still trying to carve out a niche in the not-quite-proven business of selling postage on the Web.
Company officials hoped that PhotoStamps might be the product that delivered the company into prosperity. More than a million stamps have been ordered since the service was launched Aug. 10, and the hype helped double Stamps.com's stock price, from $9 to nearly $18.
But the stock was crawling back toward the $13 mark Friday, as analysts debated whether the program has a future. The U.S. Postal Service has not said whether it will continue the program or cancel it, and a spokesman for Stamps.com said in an e-mail that the company's chief executive was unavailable to comment Friday.
"Everybody's in a dither over this -- what we've been saying all along is that this is a test that will conclude Sept. 30," said Gerry McKiernan, a spokesman for the Postal Service. "We'll look at it then."
Trial period
McKiernan said the agency plans to consider the issue for 90 days before issuing a decision. He would not say what criteria the Postal Service would use in deciding whether to continue the program.
The U.S. Postal Service would not be the first to have a photo stamp program, if it allows PhotoStamps to continue. A few countries, including Canada, Ireland and Switzerland, have similar programs, according to McKiernan.
As for the Smoking Gun, a site that normally specializes in getting its hands on more titillating documents such as celebrity mug shots, editor William Bastone thinks the program may have a future.
"By all accounts, it seems the PhotoStamps idea has been popular with consumers," he said in an e-mail Friday afternoon. "We trust that if the USPS allows it to continue, Stamps.com will make sure their screening process is a bit more robust."