This is why AirBnB will never be the ebay of spaces like they aspire to be. Our personal spaces are always at risk with AirBnB unlike product transactions on Ebay.
Actually I think there are a lot of parallels with eBay. I remember the very early days of that service, when there was a lot of interpersonal communication, transactions were friendly, you could send personal checks without raising an eyebrow, etc. When it became mainstream, all that went away very quickly.
I remember the first time I got screwed on an eBay transaction I thought it was just a random, unfortunate thing -- "well, I've been using this a lot, I guess it was bound to happen." Then it happened again. Pretty quickly I realized that things were going downhill, and the trust I'd put in other users of the service was no longer reasonable.
I think that's the direction that AirBnB is headed, unless they take steps to intentionally restrict their growth and remain in a niche market. Eventually they'll have to do what eBay has done, and make the transactions as anonymous and automated as possible, and probably push all but the big commercial operations (who can absorb the fraud risk that gets pushed onto sellers) out of the market.
But the upside is, I think there's a market for services like AirBnB that are still niche. As AirBnB grows and becomes less and less pleasant to do business with, and as the risk involved in every transaction grows (as it did with eBay), there's an opportunity for someone to create a competitor that's tailored to a specific niche market. Or maybe one that's built on top of a social network, so that you're always renting from a friend of a friend or something. There are a lot of possibilities I could imagine.
But AirBnB seems to be going for mass-market adoption and I think that's the death of a friendly, trusting community if it involves money.
I remember the first time I got screwed on an eBay transaction I thought it was just a random, unfortunate thing -- "well, I've been using this a lot, I guess it was bound to happen." Then it happened again. Pretty quickly I realized that things were going downhill, and the trust I'd put in other users of the service was no longer reasonable.
I think that's the direction that AirBnB is headed, unless they take steps to intentionally restrict their growth and remain in a niche market. Eventually they'll have to do what eBay has done, and make the transactions as anonymous and automated as possible, and probably push all but the big commercial operations (who can absorb the fraud risk that gets pushed onto sellers) out of the market.
But the upside is, I think there's a market for services like AirBnB that are still niche. As AirBnB grows and becomes less and less pleasant to do business with, and as the risk involved in every transaction grows (as it did with eBay), there's an opportunity for someone to create a competitor that's tailored to a specific niche market. Or maybe one that's built on top of a social network, so that you're always renting from a friend of a friend or something. There are a lot of possibilities I could imagine.
But AirBnB seems to be going for mass-market adoption and I think that's the death of a friendly, trusting community if it involves money.