Perhaps you’ve encountered this situation. You find someone online, via tumblr or twitter or some such, and you form the sort of casual friendship that comes very easily these days, starring their tweets, hearting their tumbls, etc. You get to know them, in a way, and suddenly, it occurs to you, that they have to {read|listen to|experience} this {book|CD|thing} that totally changed your life. You find the thing on Amazon and get ready to ship it off and then you realize, of course, that you have nowhere to ship it to. Because you don’t know where they live and because you only know this person online you think it might be, well, creepy to ask.

Amazon could solve this problem though with a “ship to any email address” feature. Here’s how it would work:

• At checkout, you would pick a new address and one of the options would be to enter an email address
• The recipient would then get an email, from Amazon, that would say something to the effect of “Someone would like to send you a gift!” and would contain a link where the gift recipient could tell Amazon, but not the sender, their shipping address
• Once that happens, the gift gets shipped, the sender gets charged, all without anyone having to get weirded out

Amazon has something like this already with their wishlist, but maybe your new friend isn’t a total narcissist or never bothered to create a wishlist or used an old email address.

I realize this is a somewhat passive-aggressive, overly technical solution to what is, fundamentally, a social problem. And I can already hear Neven berating the idea for adding an unnecessary layer of communication when all you need to do is ask for a stupid address (“somethingk somethingk reinventing ways to talk to each other somethingk somethingk”). But it does solve a problem, fleeting though it may be, inherent in the disconnect between our virtual and analog lives.

UPDATE This idea is officially Mrgan-approved. “Inventing new ways to be nice and give gifts is awesome. Inventing new ways to lie and be passive-aggressive is, well, not.”