Postcrossing
Postcrossing is a system modeled on BookCrossing project, which allows to obtain Postcrossern of Postcards from around the world. For each map you get a even sent back from another post Crosser.
The project
The project was started on 14 July 2005 by Paulo Magalhães. Everything is handled in English, to ensure a consistent communication via the website, but there is help in the forum attached to German.
Currently (November 1, 2013) already participating in nearly 455,000 members in 214 countries and territories to Postcrossing. The members are female approximately 65 percent, 14 percent male, 20 percent and 1 percent of groups without notice. Nearly 20.5 million postcards have been shipped and registered. They have traveled over 105 billion kilometers. 60 percent of all postcards are scanned by the members and to the online gallery of Postcrossing asked (and growing ). Approximately 486,000 cards are currently away. Average is a postcard 23 days on the road, with more than half of all card uses less than 15 days.
On 11 April 2008 the one millionth postcard is registered.
In less than a year, there were already two million, seven months later 3 million, six months later, 4 million and less than five months later, the five millionth postcard is registered. Every four months later there were 6 and 7 million, a good three months later, 8 million, three more months 9 million. The ten millionth postcard is registered in Germany on 27 January 2012 and came from Japan. Alone in 2012, 5 million postcards were mailed. The mark of 15 million was a specialty. It has been suggested that it is still reached in 2012. There was a countdown and a contest to see who will guess the exact time. Has reached the mark of 15 million then on 31 December at 14:46 CET clock. Currently about 1 million postcards are sent out in about two months.
Operation
To use Postcrossing, registration is required, in which the postal address and an e -mail address must be deposited. In order to send a postcard, an address must be requested. The assignment is random, the country of destination can not be selected. However, it can be selected whether to send cards to his home country or would like to receive it. Each card is assigned a unique number (ID ) according to the EN - 12345 schema. The letters stand for the country where the sender lives, the numbers are assigned in ascending order by country.
When writing the postcard the sender is not bound by any rules, it only needs the ID on the postcard show up, so the recipient can confirm receipt. If a mailed postcard arrived, registered the receiver the map by entering the ID on the website. Thus, the sender address is released and distributed randomly to another participant. So you can only get a postcard if you have even sent one.
To protect against spam, a user can first send only five cards (and thus get only five addresses ), and for each of the recipients registered another card, so at first no more than five cards of the user on the go ( traveling ) are. As the number of messages sent by the user and registered by the respective receiver cards, however, this limit increases, so that the user can send more cards simultaneously over time. The maximum number of simultaneous mailable cards is 100 pieces.
Members distribution
Stand February 19, 2014
Trivia
Turned On 14 October 2011, the Dutch postal company PostNL on the philatelic event Postex 2011 in Apeldoorn, a Postcrossing Stamps Set before. They are used in the Netherlands as a full postal stamps for sending international postcards and are among the collectors of Postcrossing community often a desired collector's item. The stamps were designed by Garech and Declan Stone. The first arc was Postcrossing - founder Paulo Magalhães on October 15, 2011 at the event presented. A set of ten brands costs nine euros in the Netherlands.
In Finland, four different Postcrossing stamps are available from 9 September 2013. These stamps were designed by the design agency Kokoro & Moi.