This seems attractive, but curiously reliant on entities without your interests at heart<p>> I own most of them on Amazon Instant Video,<p>> my MP3 collection when I moved to Spotify. Books to > Kindle.<p>> Photos to Dropbox and Facebook.<p>> Notebooks to Hackpad.<p>> Zipcar is the cloud for cars.<p>> Exec is the cloud for secretarial work.<p>> And though there isn’t a “cloud” for housing, AirBnB, Craigslist, and VRBO are getting close.<p>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.<p>I don't think this is for <i>me</i>, 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.
"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. <i>Cloud</i> starts to sound like <i>service</i>. 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.
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.
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.<p>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.