Do you remember the last time you got a postcard from a friend? Or the last time you sent one?

For many of us, Facebook status updates and Instagram snaps have supplanted the old fashioned postcard as means of choice to drop a line describing where we are and what we’re up to.

Remember these little guys? Postcards are coming back.
(photo courtesy Arlette, Flickr Creative Commons)

But a few enterprising souls are bringing the postcard back to life, with a twist—lots of the postcard projects currently trending offer ways to connect with people we don’t yet know, not just friends and family. Here’s a roundup:

• The Neighborhood Postcard Project (an international offshoot of the SF Postcard Project) “fosters community connection through the exchange of positive personal stories from people in marginalized communities. Residents fill out a postcard with a story from their community; that postcard is then mailed to a random person in that city to create a stronger connection between people and communities.”

• Postcrossing “allows anyone to receive postcards (real ones, not electronic) from random places in the world. Why? Because, like the founder, there are lots of people who like to receive real mail.”

• The Postcard Collective is “motivated by an intrinsic human desire to share experience. Our mission is to build and maintain a network of individuals who seek to share their art with each other in the form of postcards, to open up a direct line of communication between artists, and to promote a sense of camaraderie and connectedness.”

There are actually tons more, too! Get Googling to check them out, then get your stamp wetter ready. (Oh wait, people really don’t use those anymore.)

—

Have you made an interesting new connection through a postcard interaction? Tell us about it!