Postcrossing

has just reached its 15 millionth postcard. 

That is over 5 million postcards in a single year! Pretty neat in our book!

 The Postcrossing project was started by Paulo Magalhães from Portugal as a side project while he was a student. Paulo loves to receive mail and postcards in particular; from friends, family or from anywhere in the globe. The more random the place and person, the better. He knew more people shared the same interest, but there was no good way yet to connect them across the planet.

And that's how he got the initial idea of creating an online platform to support this offline hobby. The goal: to connect people across the world through postcards, independent of their location, age, gender, race or beliefs.

After playing with the idea for a while, Paulo started to create the website in his free time. Friends helped testing, Ana Campos designed the Logo and after much indecision about the name, on July 14th, 2005 the Postcrossing Project website was open to everyone for free.

Postcrossing first serverIn a matter of days many users started to signup from countries all over the world, overcoming Paulo's best expectations for the website. At this time, Postcrossing was still hosted in an old home computer tucked away in a storage room in Paulo's home. But quickly it became apparent that what started as a pet project was quickly turning into a great success.

Since then, Postcrossing has been in the media spotlight around the world, from the BBC  to random newspapers, magazines and blogs in languages and alphabets that Paulo can't even grasp.

Postcrossing has brought together many people making the world a smaller place - there are countless reports of new friendships made, new languages learned, and numerous cultural facts about other countries and people learned through the project.