TEDxOPorto - You've got mail

These posts about TEDxOPorto will be written in English 

so I can share with the world the ideas worth spreading.

One of the marvelous things about TED talks is the broadening of horizons.

Some talks are high-tech, scientific, state of the art and amaze you because they reveal that the futuristic scenarios investigators, geeks and visionaries dream about are actually a possibility about to happen. Other talks however just wonder about the simple things in life.

These so called inspirational talks don’t debate global issues, disclose major trends, nor reveal surprising studies or astonishing discoveries. They just talk about people and proof with unquestionable doubt that it is not necessary to be a rocket scientist, a biochemist, a neuroscientist or an IT guru to have a small, non-methodological, non-mathematical, non-paper peer review idea that can make a difference and induce a positive change in the world.

One of the speakers at TEDxOPorto was Ana Campos, a young woman that like so many others likes to travel and to meet people. 
In an era of social networking with people texting and mailing each other all the time, Ana is still a fan of a traditional mean of sending messages: postcards.

As she was talking about the joy one feels when going to the mailbox (not the virtual one) and finding something more than bills and advertising the audience was listening with that condescending attitude of “ok, it’s nice but that was decades ago”.

Ana created a platform - POST CROSSING - that gathers postcard fans like her. She told us how surprised she was when she discovered so many people had this need of writing with a pen on the back of card. She made us belief that this kind of contact can be so intimate and truthful that people have developed friendships and even fallen in love just by exchanging handwritten words.
Ana shared impressive figures about a half a million people community that has shared 22 million postcards so far. The idea is simple: you write a postcard to someone and you receive one back.

You look at this idea as something kind of cute but then you imagine that it is far more simple to connect with people around the world through Facebook and getting to know them from a profile quick view.

But as Ana was finishing her presentation she asked us to look beneath our seat and find the postcard that was there for us. What happened then was miraculous! People were really delighted with the postcards they found! This childish reaction from the audience, eager for reading the postcards and sharing them with the person on the next seat, is an example of how basic our emotions truly are.

Simple things trigger happiness feelings; simple things change your life.