Thanks to your iPhone you can couch surf, catch a ride downtown, find a date or maybe even source a freebie for dinner.

The sharing economy has gone mainstream, filling our smartphones with apps that run counter to your mother’s admonitions. You know, those common sense “Stranger Danger” rules we’ve all had drilled into our heads about talking to strangers, letting them in our houses or accepting stuff from them.

But it’s one thing to talk about these apps and another to actually use them.

So we did. Cult of Mac staffers jumped into cars with strangers, let them stay in our houses, took random jobs and put out free treats for the taking. The results were, uh, mixed.

Let us know in the comments what your experience has been!

Social networks have trained us to share all the superfluous details of ourselves, but a new app called Leftover Swap is trying to take things to the next level by allowing users to share leftover scraps of meals with one another.

Hungry, but too cheap to buy a $0.99 hot dog down the street? With LeftoverSwap you can just pull up a map of discarded meals in your area, make a selection, and then go pick it up from your neighbor.