(FORTUNE Magazine) – I'm beginning to wonder if I should have invested in Ceiva. I had the opportunity about a year ago, but I didn't even tell my partners about it. Ceiva had all the hallmarks of the kind of deal they hate: The company sells a low-priced piece of hardware to consumers at retail, and its business model is predicated on the device's becoming wildly popular. And that's the problem: I can now see that it just might become wildly popular.

Whether it would have been a good investment or not, Ceiva's digital picture frame proves that Internet appliances can thrive. Most of these devices have a whole set of fatal flaws: They are pretty expensive for what they do; they don't work that well; and they're designed to let people who don't like computers do computer-like things, which is a problem because those kinds of people don't buy computer-like products, no matter what their size or shape. All this leads to another fatal flaw: These products don't sell.

A few digital products have avoided these flaws. PDAs, like the Palm or RIM BlackBerry, are popular. MP3 music players are a hit. Digital cameras sell millions of units a year. Now I'm thinking that digital picture frames may well follow the success of digital cameras.

Ceiva is a digital picture frame, which is actually a computer designed strictly to display digital pictures. Ceiva has a color LCD screen, the digital innards to store and present pictures, and a modem to call an Internet service to get new pictures. It costs $300, including the first year of the annual service fee of $50. (Amazon sells the frames for $285.)

One thing that's cool about Ceiva is that it looks funky, in a cheap kind of way. The frame looks like balsa wood painted black. The digital picture has the matte feel you can ask for in drugstores. There are only two buttons, one to control brightness and one to turn a slide show off or on--and tell the machine to dial in to the service. The cheap look is intentional; the point is to convince people that this isn't an expensive, complicated digital device.

The second thing that's cool is just that: It is easy to use. We got one as a review unit last spring. For months it just sat around our home office, rotating through ten pictures I had loaded in. But something about the frame appealed to my wife, Charlotte, and she decided to buy two for our mothers for Christmas. And only then did we start to understand how cool these things really are.

(She also considered the Kodak Smart Picture Frame, and there's a digital frame from Kensington, but she stuck with the Ceiva, primarily because we already had one. So don't think of this column as an endorsement of Ceiva in particular.)

Now that we've got three of the things in-family, Ceiva starts getting interesting. Neither mom is a hardcore PC user; both, in fact, primarily use WebTV devices to send e-mail to the rest of our family. But both managed to get the units installed, and Charlotte and I have sent them a bunch of pictures--of our last vacation, a recent visit to my siblings, and other random events.

I was surprised at how easily they managed to get everything up and running. I'm glad they managed it, and I'm glad we sent them the devices. Because what we've got now is kind of tantalizing: a virtual photographic network for the family.

We post the photos to Ceiva's Website, which is more user-friendly than other photo sites I've tried to use. The device pulls the photos off the site, and doing that is dead simple. Sure, there's stuff to work out: Digital cameras are still new, and the systems and software supporting digital photography are primitive. Preparing pictures for other frames, and trying to keep track of what you've sent to whom in what format, are difficult. But once you've mastered the process, you've begun to replace the entire system of taking, printing, and mailing photographs. And that's very, very cool. In the past two months I've shared more pictures with my mother and mother-in-law than I have in, oh, all my life pre-Ceiva.

So now I'm beginning to think about making sure that everyone in my family has a picture frame--all five of my brothers and sisters, Charlotte's sister and brother, all the nieces and nephews old enough to have set up their own households. The Alsop and Ziems (Charlotte's family) network might extend to 30 or more people over time, with new digital photographs showing up every day on most of the frames in the network.

All this, of course, is precisely what the prognosticators conjure when they talk glowingly about an ever present, ubiquitous network that supplies rich media to people everywhere. Well, here it is now, from a cheap-looking device that tries to hide that it's a computer.

STEWART ALSOP is a partner with New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm. Except as noted, neither he nor his partnership has a financial interest in the companies mentioned. He can be reached at alsop_infotech@fortunemail.com. His column can be bookmarked online at www.fortune.com/technology/alsop.