Dear enterprising developers of the world, I have a request:<\/p>\n
I travel a lot. I prefer staying in apartments to staying in hotels. But I hate imposing on friends and, frankly, crashing on couches isn’t as fun as it used to be. When I’m lucky, I randomly learn that a friend is out of town and I have the opportunity to housesit. And when I’m lucky, I randomly learn that someone I trust is in Boston when I’m not and can get them to catsit\/housesit. Cuz I’m always begging for housesitters. But there has to be a better way of getting this information in our world of interconnectedness.<\/p>\n
I want an application that lets me announce to my friends when I’m out of town and my apartment is vacant or when I need a housesitter. And I want to know when people that I know are out of town and would welcome me to housesit\/catsit\/plantsit. As wonderful as couchsurfing.com<\/a> and airbdb<\/a> are, they don’t serve my needs. I don’t want the burden of having to socialize with strangers (or, realistically, friends) when I travel for work nor do I typically want to stay at strangers’ places (or have strangers stay at my place). I want an easy way to trade apartments with people that I already know. And I want to know when people’s homes are vacant, not when I’m welcome to crash at their place. <\/p>\n I want to be able to create a calendar of when my place is empty and see when my friends’ places are empty. I want to be able to indicate who I trust to see my empty apartment calendar. I want to be able to pivot based on location and see when there’s a specific need (like catsitting). It’d be great to message out to friends when I have a catsitting need. I don’t want to make my calendar available to just anyone that I know so opening it up to anyone in my Facebook social graph isn’t the solution. I want it to be really easy for my friends to indicate when they’re gone so that it’s not a crazy burden to keep the calendar updated. .<\/p>\n Perhaps there’s a tool out there that would meet my needs that I don’t know about and, if so, please tell me. But so far, I haven’t been able to find one. And I don’t think that it would be that hard to build; a minimalist tool would be good enough. I’m not sure that such an application is actually monetizable because no money is being exchanged, but perhaps travel ads could make it profitable.<\/p>\n Anyhow, I throw this desire to the coding wolves in the hopes that someone might make it a reality. I would be eternally grateful.<\/p>\n ktxby<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear enterprising developers of the world, I have a request: I travel a lot. I prefer staying in apartments to staying in hotels. But I hate imposing on friends and, frankly, crashing on couches isn’t as fun as it used to be. When I’m lucky, I randomly learn that a friend is out of town […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[856,861,866],"class_list":["post-2671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-housesitting","tag-request","tag-tool"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2671"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2686,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2671\/revisions\/2686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}