Postcards with their ups and downs

Since last month, I actively started to do direct swaps to some people I met in facebook group. Before, I’ve never ever tried to do direct swaps since it would take so much time for me than only send official postcards through postcrossing system.By doing direct swaps, I firstly have to provide a postcard album with beautiful postcards to be promoted to other postcrossers (the term of people who are postcrossing members). The second, I have to actively update my album and follow the offers if I want to have good quality and preference postcard. Then, I need to know the people who I want to interact with. Talking about direct swaps is also about trust between two parties. So you could imagine that doing direct swaps spends very much times.

More than a year ago, I started an account in postcrossing.com. That is a site providing postcards and stamps lover to send and get snail-mailing pals from around the worlds.  The system used in Postcrossing.com is that people can only send the postcards randomly to the member and they, in return, could only obtain postcards from random people being members in postcrossing. To protect the system, people have limitition on requesting the random address. The limitation will decrease as we send more postcards. We will get the ID-number of postcards given when we requested the address. We have to write the ID on the postcard we send so the receivers could register the postcards as the proof that the postcard has been arrived. I  do not need to create the album and consider the bad-and-good postcrosser.

There are two differences between doing direct swaps and sending/getting the postcard through official one. The first is about preferences. We can not force people to send the postcard fitted our preferences through official postcrossing. However, we could choose, even compete, freely with other swappers who are interested in the same card as we want in direct swaps. Here, we have to compete in offering the best and beautiful postcards to the people we insist to do swap.