I have some thoughts on the sharing economy. Now that I have used Airbnb, I actually have a shred of experience with the system.
While staying with hosts, I found myself trying to “game” the system. I wanted a good review, so I bent over backwards to be nice to the hosts, and even make friends with them. I don’t know if I did this more than I would have otherwise. I did get good reviews.
Airbnb will even link to my Facebook account. I don’t know to what extent that means the two providers are integrated. I suspect Uber does the same thing.
In the non-sharing economy, your credit rating is everything. The better it is, the more financial options you have available to you. You start out with none, and have to work to get a good rating. But it its an easy thing to grow if you do it carefully over time. It is why I got a credit card in university even though I didn’t really need one at the time.
Now I can see Facebook becoming the new social rating service. If you link everything to your Facebook account, all the other services can see if you are a trustworthy person or not. Different from your credit rating, this is more of a personality rating.
(This is actually something I’ve been wanting for some time, a way to rate people as human beings. If someone is a jerk, it would be cathartic to be able to let other people know that I believe he is a jerk and therefore consequences will happen. But that is a system that would be very open to abuse, so we shouldn’t go there.)
But, similar to how I got a credit card in university, it implies that everyone should get a Facebook profile to grow their social rating. You need to start developing a profile with history, or otherwise you will look like you just made a new fake person because the real you has a poor rating. And it is an easy thing to grow if you do it carefully over time.
This feels like an advertisement for Facebook: use it early and often so that you can participate in the new economy.
It is an end-run around the old economy. It is similar to how the world electrical grid may evolve in the future. Instead of all the competing electrical plugs you need in North America versus Europe versus Britain etc, you may instead just use USB outlets. A technology that didn’t have the intention to become the power standard of the world, does.