Some of you may know I built a Personal Inventory Manager program (Wazitat) in 2007-8 and then got bogged down trying to make it a way to share goods among friends and neighbors (the philosophical issues bogged me down) . Now there are numerous companies that provide a platform for sharing items or excess capacity (such as a room). It’s a sound model. This article in today’s New York Times offers a helpful glimpse into the real life world of people who use services such as AirBnB and SnapGoods. The principle underlying these services is “access trumps ownership.” I’ve been a believer in that since “Wired” turned me on to the powers of a network economy. Funny enough, one of my first blog posts (before they were called blogs) was about the diminished importance of ownership versus access. The crux was: “With ownership comes responsibility (taxes, insurance..); with access, opportunity.”
Although I bowed out of developing Wazitat so that I can focus on music and comedy, I remain an advocate and user of peer-sharing… and I may re-start development of some of Wazitat’s functions.
