Saturday, February 11, 2012

Postcrossings: The Amazingly Addictive Hobby

 (Day 28 of the 365 day photo challenge)

On January 30, 2012 I received my 20th postcrossing postcard.  What is Postcrossing?  It's a website that allows International postcard exchanges with random users on the site, and the amount of users is vast.  Just last week the site reached 10 million sent postcards.  Only 13% of the users are from the USA.  10% are from Russia.  8% from China.  7% from the Netherlands and Taiwan.  6% from Germany.  5% from Poland and so on.


I found out about the site 5 months ago when I was searching through 101 goal ideas from the Day Zero Project website, a website where people list 101 goals they want to achieve in 1001 days.  It seems simple coming up with 101 goals, but after only 30 or so I was stumped, and on the website I saw some users wanted to receive 20 postcards through postcrossing.com from 20 different countries.


The amount of postcards you can send in the beginning is only 5 at a time, and when someone receives your postcard, someone random will then send you one.  In short, only people who send postcards get postcards, and the system has worked really well so far.



The postcards are so popular in the Netherlands that they even have an official postcrossing stamp.  



Thus far I've sent postcards to: 3 Belarus, 1 Belgium, 1 Bulgaria, 2 China, 4 Finland, 3 Germany, 1 Japan, 6 Netherlands, 1 Poland, 1 Romania, 4 Russia, 1 Spain, and 1Tawain.


I've received postcards from: 1 Australia, 1 Belarus, 1 Canada, 1 China, 3 Germany, 4 Netherlands, 2 Poland, 1 Portugal, 1 Russia, 1 Switzerland, 2 Taiwan, 2 Ukraine, and 1 United Kingdom.

I've sent more then received, because I have 4 postcards that were recently registered that I haven't gotten yet, and 3 that are still traveling.  There are a couple postcards that expired because they either got lost, or the user didn't bother to register it, but in most cases that's rare.

I'm really loving this, and it really is quite fun.  It's always a surprise when a postcard arrives in the mail.

Happy Postcrossings!
Sarah 

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