On: Mechanical Turk: Now with 40.92% Spam.

[staunch]

It's unbelievable that no one has swooped in to crush MTurk given how little Amazon has done to develop it since 2005(!)

[aresant → staunch]

I think this is one of those examples where nobody's rushing in because no matter how you slice it, the product is just not that useful.

I've used it a few times and because the eco system is truly about hiring dirt, dirt cheap labor you kind of get what you pay for.

Beyond that the revenue model sucks - the concept of running millions of micro-transactions and having a little piece of all the action is compelling, but again because the product use is so limited it's difficult to make signifigant revenue.

[iwwr → aresant]

Last I checked, MTurk still accepted only US credit cards. This puts a dent in the potential size of the ecosystem.

If the purpose is dirt-cheap labor, they should open up the door to markets where $cents matter.

[thetable → iwwr]

I'm pretty sure I recently used a non-US credit card to pay for MTurk. They require you live in the US, but they don't seem to verify that.

[iwwr → thetable]

They verify for valid zip codes and they prune false addresses from time to time. You have to lie to Amazon, or know someone in the US.

[eru → iwwr]

You can work from everywhere. You just have to have a US credit card to pay somebody.

[xlorm → staunch]

It seems like going through CrowdFlower could help a lot. Has anyone used it? I guess it worked for the author.

At my last job I was involved in a project where we were going to use CrowdFlower, but it ended up being canceled. I was always curious about how good their results are.

[klous → staunch]

A worldwide crowdsource platform for the workers who only have access to cell phones is txteagle http://txteagle.com/ and article written on them: http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.asp...

[herdrick → staunch]

Market size. People speculate it's only worth $1M a year to Amazon. But what could it be if it were better done?