Last week I sent this postcard to someone in Germany. It arrived in 6 days: awesome. Then yesterday another German address came up... and it was to the same name at the same address! Wait a minute, I thought this wasn't supposed to happen on Postcrossing? Lo and behold, it was the same person with a different account.
I've heard that people do create multiple Postcrossing accounts - I guess to get around the limits on how many postcards they can send? Initially I felt sort of cheated, like - hey, I just sent a postcard to this guy! But I pondered it a bit further, and figured he's really enthusiastic about postcards, and he clearly cares enough to register them quickly. He also has a full, robust profile, and has had both accounts for nearly a year with around 200 postcards sent and received in each. So why not send to someone who's really enthusiastic and will register immediately?
One of the things I love about Postcrossing is the serendipity, so I did feel taken aback to be assigned to send a postcard to the very same person basically one day after he registered the first one. In that sense, having multiple accounts is sort of cheating the system. But I'll admit I have often toyed with the idea of opening a second Postcrossing account myself - my username there long predates this blog, so it is not Missive Maven. Something always holds me back from doing it, though; I guess it's a combination of some weird sense of ethics plus really wanting to keep all my stats in one place. Under my current account, I am allowed to have 15 postcards at once, and the way it works out, I usually end up sending one new one a day.
I've got a postcard traveling in the USA right now that's been traveling for 40 days and the recipient hasn't logged into Postcrossing for a month, so I am pretty well prepared for that one to expire... and then there are all the postcards that get sucked up into that giant country on another continent that has a poor track record, in my experience, with postcards actually arriving or getting registered. So I've had the max number traveling and, again, I've been tempted to make that second account. I'm now repeating myself, so I'll just stop and ask for your feedback:
What do you think? Do you have more than one Postcrossing account? Do you think it's inappropriate or no big deal?
