Some of you might know that we at Youngin Europe have been huge fans of a little (actually pretty big) thing called Couchsurfing. To cut a long story short, the idea is/was to create a global community of people willing to offer their couch to fellow surfers if they happen to be in town. It worked. About a week ago there were in exess of 90,000 couchsurfers. Even the YIE HQ had a registered couch.
Then came the storm. Some kind of massive error meant that Couchsurfing as it was was all but destroyed. The details of the error are as yet unclear. Casy Fenton, the project's architect and manager sent a message to all 90,000 members informing them of the tragedy. Couchsurfing was no more.
Then came the response. Needless to say, many within the community, including myself, were deeply upset, and desperate to do something. Thousands of emails poured into the Couchsurfing HQ in Montreal, techy members scrambled to recover data from Google's cache, or to set up couchsurfing 'refugee' sites, everyone and his dog offerred to help restore the community, ideas of how to improve it flew in from everywhere....you get the picture.
And now comes Couchsurfing 2.0. Whether this was the intention from the out, CS is coming back. Watch this space. This is a truly fascinating story.
