One Response so far

1. 1. M. Thyer on Mar 12th, 2009 at 6:47 pm

   Toby,

   This has become something of a game for me. Amazon’s MTurk.com can be a lot of fun, however there are a few deficits I see in the system.

   1) No one is willing to pay real scratch for the work they want done. It’s pretty rare that someone is willing to even provide a minimum wage equivalent for any bit of work they need done. When they do those jobs get snatched up quick!
   2) Most of the tasks (HITs in their lingo) are for things you can or must do on-line. There are relatively few that require more than your primary mouse finger to click something. Occasionally clicking can be bad, I looked at one HIT recently that went to a site which was obviously ready to install all kinds of malware on your system.
   3) It’s difficult or impossible to specify a location specific task. I’m still in the learning to do HITs phase of this thing, but I’ve noticed that if you need to move a package between two addresses in Philadelphia on Monday between the hours of morning and night, you’d better call a bicycle currier because it’s nearly impossible to tell someone that’s what you need.

   I’m looking at building a similar set-up to be deployed as a Twitter augmentation (think about apps like twhirl which allow all sorts of cool integrations [cross social group posting, image sharing, etc], but for turking). You could post your job with a #reference and then people would search on that to get it and interface with your requirements. Think of it as being able to toss a fishing line into a very large ocean to catch exactly the fish you’d like to eat tonight.