I use Skype, it's great, and you can use it 'on your terms' or when time permits. My mum loves "chatting" with dd on there, and she can really follow her progress in real time, not photos. And it's free !
What about a blog? I agree Skype is great too.
Ours are all several thousand kms away, and we use all of the above. Though neither set 'do' facebook and that's great with me cos I'm not a fan.
DH's parents refuse to buy a computer to get updates so they just have to wait until I can print an mail photos. We ring each set weekly and invariably there's not much to say but at least the contact is there.
When we lived closer (like 600kms away) we used to make a trip at least every couple of months or encourage someone to come down to us. Funny though how it was always us making the effort. Now that's it's an exxie trip and difficult with youngsters it will sadly be much less often like once a year.
my grandparents are all back in the Uk and I know my brother (who's a web developer) set up a website for my mum to upload photos and short videoes to it so that they don't miss out on my children. My bro set it up so that you need a password to access it to limit it to family. You could then add a blog to that as Kim suggested.
Most of our relatives are in the UK, so we do use facebook for sharing photos and videos with them, and also use skype or gmail video chat too. There are lots of photo sharing only sites you could use instead of facebook, which don't have the distractions of facebook - e.g. flickr (can also use for video), snapfish, picasa - if you want the photos to be private you will have to get your relatives to sign up too. Flickr is my personal favourite because it stores photos at full resolution so I can get them back if I lost my electronic copy - flickr also does printing (in Australia via Snapfish) so if you allow it your contacts (eg. family) can print off their own photos.
With my parents we video chat almost every day for 10 mins, with PIL's probably once a week, and I upload photos to facebook several times a week (I get hassled if I don't but - as we live on other side of world to them, they will probably get to see DD in real life at most once a year (if was reliant on us going back there would be more like once every four years) I think is definitely worth the time and hope that can continue to do it when I go back to work fulltime).
Yep - skype. Both sets of grandparents are more than a few hours away and the children speak to them every few days. It gives them the opportunity to see the little ones and what they are up to, they get to talk to them, watch their development and they aren't strangers to the children when they do visit.
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