
The Housing Cloud - kapilkale
http://www.kapilkale.com/blog/the-housing-cloud/
======
pnathan
This seems attractive, but curiously reliant on entities without your
interests at heart

> I own most of them on Amazon Instant Video,

> my MP3 collection when I moved to Spotify. Books to > Kindle.

> Photos to Dropbox and Facebook.

> Notebooks to Hackpad.

> Zipcar is the cloud for cars.

> Exec is the cloud for secretarial work.

> And though there isn’t a “cloud” for housing, AirBnB, Craigslist, and VRBO
> are getting close.

What happens if/when these services go out of business or pursue business
models at variance with what you want? This seems to assume that these things
will always be available in the form that you like.

I don't think this is for _me_ , it clashes with my desire to be able to not
depend on other entities that much. Regards to anyone who can pull it off
though.

~~~
kapilkale
I can't think of a specific example where I personally am concerned about it.
As long as demand for a cloud service is real and profitable to serve, some
entity will do it.

Data portability is only a problem with unproven services. If Facebook were to
shut down, photo and data export services would immediately crop up.

I'm more concerned about the opposite scenario, where I own something and
mismanage it, like losing my hard drive without backup, or having a disaster
hit my car / house where I don't have the proper insurance.

~~~
graue
I'd be very concerned about Spotify, which is losing money. Although they have
massive revenue, they end up immediately paying nearly all of it to record
labels. [http://hypedsound.com/news/details/SPOTIFY-FINANCIALS-
DEEMED...](http://hypedsound.com/news/details/SPOTIFY-FINANCIALS-DEEMED-
UNSUSTAINABLE) \- Link includes a talk by Dalton Caldwell about why anyone
doing what Spotify does is basically doomed.

And content portability is definitely a problem with Amazon. Instant Video and
Kindle both use DRM, so an export service would likely be illegal, and
certainly nontrivial. Amazon could suddenly deny you access to your
“purchases”: [http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-
says/2012/10/rights-y...](http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-
says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm)

The other services don't seem as risky in terms of data loss, although
Facebook could suddenly make your photos more public than you set them to be;
they've taken many similar steps before.

~~~
rpm4321
Spotify is obviously still in the land grab phase. I pay $5 a month for it,
and would easily pay at least 6 times that, maybe more.

Furthermore, the vast majority of its users are still freeloaders. I think a
sizeable percentage would convert to paying customers if Spotify started to
throttle back the free accounts or play more ads. Its an incredible service at
a great value, especially when you cough up a tiny bit of money to get rid of
the ads.

------
coderdude
"Cloud" seems to have become synonymous with "having someone else ____ for
you," where the blank is filled in with some verb like
store/possess/drive/etc. Words have the tendency to become loaded with
additional meaning over time but this one is stuffed full. _Cloud_ starts to
sound like _service_. Admittedly though, I doubt we'll hear things like "the
trash service came and sent my garbage to the cloud" and your examples do
work.

~~~
saraid216
So an old school cabbie service is cars in the cloud?

~~~
sk5t
Exactly - you don't own the depreciating car, nor maintain or insure it
(a.k.a. backup, disaster recovery) or even train in how to operate or secure
it in a potentially risky environment. Transportation as a Service, man, it's
the hot new thing.

Personally I'm still waiting for Service-Oriented Automobiles to knit
together.

------
marquis
I live like this, but I tend to circulate around the same places to see
friends, and check out new countries as opportunities allow. It allows me to
leave winter clothes in someone's closet (you don't want to live in Hawaii
temporarily and have to have your Montreal snow jacket taking up valuable
suitcase space). But I also own very little and like the OP, as much as I can
do online I do. Kindle replaced my need to buy books at airports and
subsequently leave them somewhere, and anything really important I'll send
home to a lock-up. It's a great way to live for those that don't mind change
being constant, not for everyone - but for anyone who wants to, it's so
possibly easy now that it's absurd.

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shalmanese
I've always thought there's room for a startup that's an abstraction layer
above AirBNB. Anecdotally, I know 2 or 3 people who do this semi-
professionally for their friends. They'll put up the listing, price it, manage
contact with guests, handle all the cleaning/key exchange etc in return for a
cut of the profits.

If you're out of town for a month, the effort of setting up an AirBNB can be
enough of a deterrent to keep a place empty for many people but if there was a
service to abstract away all the details, it's win-win.

~~~
pnathan
Sounds like a property management firm. :-)

------
oldgregg
Sounds like a lonely place.

~~~
stretchwithme
Or a vacation or move whenever you like. It could be very liberating.

Personally, I would love to be able to live in New York, Florida and
California at different times of the year. Frankly, I would have visited my
family a lot more if a place to crash were cheap and clean, once my parents
went into a nursing home.

Hotels are usually the most expensive part of any trip. On one trip to NYC, I
realized taking the redeye across the country was cheaper than staying the
night in Manhattan. It would be great to slash that by two thirds.

