That's very nice of you, actually! With the extraordinary range of products available through Amazon.com, including streaming movies and the slick new Kindle Fire, I'd be amazed if your friend couldn't find at least a half-dozen things worth picking up with your gift card. The biggest question ends up being how much. I'm thinking $10/day so $100? :-)

The timing is good because I just sent an Amazon gift card to a colleague as a thank you for him helping me out with some problems I had with my video gear, so I captured the entire sequence of events (though it's pretty easy).

To start out, log in to your Amazon.com account.

Then, on the top of the page, you'll see this:

Click on "Gift Cards", as shown.

That's it. You can figure it out from there.

No, kidding.

Let's continue...

Amazon has a lot of different options in terms of what kind of gift card you want to send. You can share one via Facebook, print the certificate on your printer to share with the recipient (ideal for putting in a card, of course) or even have Amazon mail the gift card along with a greeting card, with free one day shipping. Nice.

I wanted to just email the certificate information and will assume you want to do the same. To do that, click on "Shop now" underneath the "E-mail" option.

You'll see the wide range of design styles available:

If you do the math, that's 3*33 = 99 different designs. Quite impressive, and a few are for holidays or celebrations I've never even heard of. I'll let you poke around to see if you can find them too (though if you're familiar with more obscure holidays, they might not be so surprising).

"Select" the card design you prefer then look below for the fields and information that Amazon needs to complete the gift process:

Conveniently they suggest $100 as the gift card amount, just as I did earlier. Still, if you'd rather not be quite that generous, it's okay, enter a different amount. Then enter their name, their email address, your name, and a message explaining what it is and who it's from.

Note that you can specify a date in the future for the email to be sent, so if you're afraid you're going to forget your wife's birthday, you can set this gift up weeks or even months in advance! Helpful indeed!!

Ready? Click on "Add to order" and on the right side of the screen you'll see your shopping card widget update:

Click "Proceed to Checkout" and you might be surprised to encounter this:

What they're not saying here is that this is a fraud protection mechanism. If you think about it, a hacker who can break into your Amazon account could otherwise easily send themselves hundreds or even thousands of dollars as a gift certificate, straight off your credit card number. Not good at all. So don't grumble, be glad Amazon's taken this extra step to protect your account. :-)

Finish the transaction and the mail announcing your thoughtful gift card should be sent within a minute or two. Done. Nice job.