I’ve been on a slight eBay bender lately. Having a lot of fun with it. It’s been a while since I used their system really extensively and I really like what they have done with it. They have an excellent system for (1) slicing through a hell of a lot of information to find what you’re looking for, (2) keeping track of your purchases, and (3) acting as an intermediary for transactional agreements/contracts.

Aside from the purely practical stuff though, I have begun imagining the eBay of the future as being almost like the Replicator from the Star Trek series. You just sit there in front of your computer and plug in a type of object you desire, and then it helps you narrow down which sub-type you are looking for. And in order to actualize the object within your spaceship (house) you have to make sure you have enough energy credits and pure mass available for the computer to resequence into the object you are looking for.

I was even thinking, if you wanted to be like super-ultra-nerdy about it, you could even have this replicator thing in a “bay” on your spaceship labelled “E”. Get it? E-bay?