

Landing page for my potential startup, Minute Favors. Is there potential here? - mcrittenden
http://minutefavors.com/

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mutagen
I'd be concerned it will turn into the "Link my page for a dollar" and
"retweet this to your 10k spambot followers for a dollar" that detracts from
the usefulness of these kind of services.

The gamification suggestions going on in your G+ discussion [1] are
intriguing. I could imagine trading in a virtual currency for fixed or
variable priced favors and looking to trade that back in for some help in
areas where my skills are lacking.

[https://plus.google.com/111020520676817671277/posts/VhBuNXfv...](https://plus.google.com/111020520676817671277/posts/VhBuNXfv4TD)

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MatthewPhillips
I like it, couple of potential problems though:

1) If I'm on the provider end, am I in a race with the entire planet to get
the job done first? Is $0.75 worth that?

2) Since the task can go beyond information, an exchange between
buyer/provider is needed, how will this happen? File transfer might be easy,
what if I'm request something requiring physical access (put air in my tires)?
Will you monitor it somehow for tasks than can be completed by people over the
internet, will you host files, etc?

3) If you are transferring files, how do you provide privacy?

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mcrittenden
Thanks for the comments.

1) I'm still wresting with myself on the best way to handle this. My thought
so far is that you "reserve" a request, so you mark it as spoken for and no
one else is allowed to touch it. This gives you some preset amount of time (5
min? 10 min?) to finish the task and send it back to the requester for
approval. Thoughts on that process?

2) Yeah, the plan is for it to be a hard rule that all tasks must be able to
be accomplished using only a computer. Hopefully that + the $1 fee + a
"Report" button on each task would be enough to deter people from posting
invalid stuff too often, and the rest can be handled case by case. As for
hosting files, for the MVP I'd probably just ask people to link to the files
elsewhere (public Dropbox folder, etc.) and see what the response to that is
like.

3) See #2. I'd love to avoid hosting files if at all possible because of 1)
privacy issues and 2) hosting costs but it might not be feasible to just
ignore this feature altogether.

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tebeka
How does it differ from Amazon's Mechanical Turk?

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mcrittenden
For one, it's simpler. One quick task = $1, and the turnaround time should be
pretty quick assuming there are a few people browsing the open requests list
at any given time.

Also, it's meant for small, short (one or two minutes if done by someone who
knows what they're doing) one-off tasks, which isn't the kind of thing someone
would be likely to use MT for.

