Location
No it can't quite be at grandma's house, but it could be at grandma's house on the net and Aunt Sally's and Cousin Linda's. You have the ability to make it global. Your college room mate who moved to China can join you, your newest forum buddy joins in from Canada, and your mom and sister in Iowa join you. However, you're sitting in Texas!
Using a free web page or one of the invitation centers you can set up a "home" for the shower. You can also rent chat rooms or find ones to use for free.
Invitations
Invitations to a shower are half the fun! They set the theme and are usually very personal decisions. While paper invitations are often still used, there are services popping up on the Internet that will, for free or a fee, send invitations to your list of invitees.
Some of them allow very little personalization, while others allow you to create your invitation from scratch. Many have unique features built in like collection of RSVPs, allowing a user to know if it's been viewed or not. Some even allow the ability to collect money for an event.
Games
Games can still be done! You can have written games and have the hostess time everyone to do them, while they work independently. You can have everyone submit photos of themselves as babies and try to match them with current photos. Some people get really creative and write interactive games and quizzes. The best part? No one can make you eat baby food!
Gifts
With the advent of e-commerce the baby shower is much more simple when it comes to gifts. Now there are baby registries galore, where one can simply purchase the gift and it's automatically shipped to the mom. Gift certificates also work. And then there is the old fashioned, but useful, sending gifts to mom via UPS or postal service that you hand picked.
What becomes much more interesting in the online shower is how the gifts are displayed. The online online shower I hosted, I went through and had everyone mail me the gifts. I took photos of the gifts unwrapped, then wrapped them and took photos again. I set a gift table up, took photos of that as well. Then shipped all the gifts, numbered, to the shower recipient. During the online shower, as she really unwrapped the gift, the online guests were able to see the wrapped gift and click to "unwrap" the gift with the mom. Still plenty of ooooing and ahhing in that chat!
You can also simply have links set up to the stores where items were purchased, which is a bit more simplified. There is also the more difficult side of using actual video feed (for those who have the capability), or putting up digital images quickly while the shower is taking place.
In the end the baby shower morphs into the 21st century, but the meaning is still the same to celebrate mom and baby!
