Its primary function seems to be two fold: a gift guide section running on what I presume is a sales leads generation business, and a stored value gift card that you can buy online and can be redeemed at 120 online stores.

According to Kara Swisher of BoomTown, the parent company IAC has just installed Jason Rapp, formerly IAC’s VP of M&A, as the CEO of Gifts.com. Probably long overdue. Just look at their traffic chart. How do they justify themselves to Barry Diller? And just to extend the conversation, why aren’t IAC doing more with Evite?

I’m surprised that the site has 40 employees. Looking at Gifts.com, you wonder what the hell do they all do. The site is incredibly static and doesn’t offer much value to customers. How many people do you need to update the inventory of merchandise in gift guides, and do some hopefully automated e-commerce transactions? I’d would have thought that they can get by with 10 people, max.

It’s a very real problem with these holding companies with a large portfolio of small sites. They are hidden from view, possibly aimless, seemingly unmotivated, and definitely inefficient. Maybe the new CEO will shake things up. I wish them luck. But even if he does, there are alot of room for smaller nimbler companies to run circles around them.

The unneeded blender, the detested sweater, the loathed golf clubs that are stuffed in the back of every closet are bad gifts from loved ones that spectacularly failed to hit the mark.

But new research indicates there’s a sound reason why consumers buy the wrong presents for the people they love most. Researchers Davy Lerouge and Luk Warlop suggest, in an article published in the December issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, that we often feel overconfident when buying for loved ones.

Shoppers also often mistakenly assume their tastes are the same as the gift recipient’s.

Sometimes common sense and a bit of thinking goes a long way. In both researching consumer behavior, as well as gift givign.

It’s supposed to be funny (which it isn’t), and tells us that Lowe’s is contributing to some charity. Why would I come here? Why do I care? It fails even on the only function I can gather, namely to entertain. And it doesn’t drive any traffic to Lowe’s that I can see.

Go check it out and tell me if you agree.

“For $10 with free shipping, you can buy “something” at somethingstore. You won’t know what it is until you open it, but it’s most probably new, and possibly a gadget or electronic equipment. Then again, the site explains that “you can be a 25-year-old man and your something maybe [sic] a white tank top embroidered with a pink heart.” Still, way more fun than a gift card.”

So there you have it folks, a scientific evaluation of the utility of a $10 gift card

Well, it turns out that it may not be just altruism at work. This week’s Science has an article on a study that shows giving makes the giver happier than if they kept the money for themselves.

Which, of course, makes a bunch of economists fairly unhappy. But at least they now know how to fix it!

Slicehost is the hosting company we are using on AllYourPals.com. And they have been very impressive so far. Super diligent and conscientious, very good at communicating status and planned maintenance. It’s by far the best hosting company I’ve used over the years. Many others in the industry agree.

When I was at Microsoft, leading the server product team for a web service, I used to work with the MSN ops team there all the time. At the time the MSN Ops team was very difficult to work with, and we had to constantly battle it out. They were a relatively new org at the time, and being a cost center that hardly ever get credit but lots of blame, they were always defensive when we ask them any question. We would approached them, wanted to know what caused a service outage, and they would frequently use “networking” or “hardware” as the answer because those are the areas where we would be least familiar with, thus had the highest likelihood of avoiding further discussion. There would be plenty of time where we were 90% SURE what they were feeding us a line, but couldn’t prove it or just not worth pushing it. Trust was not high. The worst outcome was that it was hard to learn their pain, and what could have been done simpler, cheaper, more reliable, had we worked together, never materialized.

Compared to that kind of corporate disfunction, Slicehost is way easier to work and live with. Unlike 98% of hosting companies out there, they don’t oversell capacity. They waitlisted us for 3 months before we got our service provisioned. But after countless troubles with hosting in the past, I appreciated their stance on their belief that quality of service trumps quantity of customers and revenue. Slicehost is always proactive about communicating issues, and never one to slide one past you.

There’s alot to be said about a competitive market. In MSN we had no choice but to use the internal ops team, and they used the monopoly position to protect themselves. Slicehost, on the other hand, must attract and retain customers based on its own merit, and they work hard at delivering their promise. Any other approach and they will kill their own business.

And that’s who you want to be on your team when you are a small web startup. Vendors like Slicehost that tells you exactly what they are selling you and deliver on it.

Female Microftee: I really want an iPhone. I thought I was going to get it for Christmas but I didn’t get it.

Friend: Oh I heard they are great. I’d love to have one.

Microftee: My birthday is coming up, maybe I’ll get one then.

She is the kind of the people AllYourPals will help to delight. I wanted to interrupt their lunch and pitch them our service and see what they think. But I was wolfing down a yummy Portobello sandwich and decided I wouldn’t be very articulate with that much fungus in my mouth.

• The Hillary Nutcracker
• Peter Petrie Egg Separator
• Ever popular, the Garden Gnome

Gag gifts are sometimes good when you run out of ideas on what to give. But like a good buzz from a night on the town, the good vibes won’t last till the morning.

And I quite like their web site design as well. It has the feel of an Archie-McPhee meets Microsoft Frontpage template circa 1995. Not to mention all the animated GIF that’s fit to host. Don’t forget to check out the Vintage Stupidity “gallery” for a rollicking good time.