The Sharing Industry Keeps Growing with Weeels, Closest Closet
The team of millennials behind Weeels.
We at Shareable.net harbor the belief that the growth of the Internet and mobile technology has made sharing more practical--and that this trend has the potential to minimize consumption, by redefining wealth as access to stuff instead of the accumulation of stuff. We're working on testing this hypothesis, by launching a series of studies with the research consultancy Latitude.
In the meantime, we're also watching the stunning growth of sharing industries, mostly networks connected by mobile tech. Just in the past week, we've heard about two new efforts.
Closest Closet helps "you connect locally to borrow, lend, recycle, and skillshare for free." Like many other online sharing projects, Closest Closet was started by an ordinary person who just saw a local need:
Joanna Basinger misses the good old days of community car washes, church events and friendly neighbors, so she started a local online community that actively shares, lends or donates skills and household items
Joanna Basinger recently sent out a Facebook update welcoming the 400th fan to the Facebook page for ClosestCloset.com, a membership website she created in November of 2009 to facilitate sharing, giving and community relationships in her Portland (Maine) area neighborhood.
Closest Closet is a free membership website where the only “fee” required is a list of ten items or services that you have available either to lend or share. Anyone can join (not just Portland residents), and unlike other online communities that only exchange hours, there is almost no limit to the types of items Closest Closet members can list. Items include books, small household appliances and cookware, craft items, children’s clothes and toys, ridesharing and carpooling—even services like help with filling out FAFSA forms and disability paperwork.
We also just heard from journalist Alex Pasternack, who working with a bunch of former Harvard classmates to launch Weeels, "a livery cab ordering and sharing app that aims to create a more efficient, affordable and friendly mode of transportation, a compromise between the private car and the public bus that maximizes people's person miles per gallon." He continues:
Because it's aimed at places and times where and when cabs can be hard to find, or in places where public transit is lacking, it works directly with city livery cab services to deliver taxis on demand, and at premium, pre-negotiated rates that are displayed on your phone before you get in the cab... It starts in NYC and on the iPhone, but we're expanding to other platforms and, hopefully, other cities.
They produced this "silly little infomercial" (as Alex describes it), which makes up in self-mocking joie de vivre what it lacks in polish:
Comments
Joanna Basinger wrote on 06.28.10, 2:48pm:
Thank you Paul, and thank you Jeremy for writing this. It's my belief too Paul, that people are inherently good, and that by networking with those that show they are good (through feedback and interactions with other community members) that we have the capability of some pretty marvelous solutions right at our own finger tips. The internet has provided a really engaging tool for a lost of us to connect and interact with those far away, but also locally. Thanks again guys! :)
Joanna Basinger wrote on 06.28.10, 3:01pm:
Oh, and I love that....I might quote it.... "by redefining wealth as access to stuff instead of the accumulation of stuff." I just love that. Thank you.
Joanna Basinger
www.closestcloset.com
It's encouraging and exciting to see all of these new efforts to leverage the social web to enrich our real-life communities and make them more shareable. I think one of the rarely-discussed advantages of the social media revolution is how it has re-engaged many 30-something and younger Americans with their communities, and the importance of having a vibrant community. I think about my parent's generation, and the parents of friends, who are so suspicious of others in their communities--almost afraid of interacting with them. As eBay and Craigslist demonstrated, and social media and these new sharing services enforce, while there are certainly untrustworthy members of any community, the majority of people are honest and trustworthy. I think this is causing a sea change in the way that we conceive and understand our communities, both online and off, and it's a refreshing necessary corrective to the model of the suspicious, cloistered suburbanite.