Fiverr

This is getting kind of ridiculous.

Desktop manufacturing and the micro-payment market Fiverr bring you custom laser-cut trophies for $5 (of which, I believe Fiverr themselves take $1)

How low is the price of "stuff" going to go?

I'm getting increasingly fascinated by Fiverr. Start scrolling through the gigs on offer and you see teenagers and amateurs offering to do jobs that would cost orders of magnitude elsewhere. Even 99Designs charges around $300-$500 for a logo. And on fiverr there are people doing it for $4. Of course it's likely to be inferior. But for some people, the price/performance trade-off will work. And the kids there are discovering new ways to slice and micro-chunk work into tinier, simpler, more predictable units.

It feels much more significant than say, oDesk or similar outsourcing sites where you still have to enter into a heavyish commitment with your supplier. And, at the same time, the slightly larger granularity, and the fact that people invent their own gigs, rather than wait for the customer to invent HITS, gives it a different character to Amazon's mechanical turk.

Worth a listen.

Wow!

SmartSheet puts The Mechanical Turk behind a Spreadsheet interface.

Clever.

Interesting state of The Mechanical Turk roundup.

This especially important :

For most users of mechanical turk (us included), it has become an API call that fits smoothly within their workflow. (Or as someone at the meetup wryly suggested, turk is a Remote Person Call.) The last pair of speakers, Lilly Irani and Six Silberman, reminded us that behind mechanical turk lies thousands of workers† ("the crowd in the cloud") working without (health care) benefits, oftentimes at extremely low hourly wages. Irani and Silberman suggested that rather than abstracting mechanical turk services as mere API calls, users should start thinking of the plight of the turks ("Mechanical Turk Bill of Rights") behind the service. As a first step they have a released a Firefox plugin that aims to narrow the information assymetry between the turks (those performing task) and requesters (those posting tasks). While requesters can see ratings for turks, requesters aren't rated: Turkopticon lets turks rate requesters. They need more turks to download and start using Turkopticon, so if you know any mechanical turks please enourage them do so.

Yesterday I downloaded Skype 3.0. There are now some interesting plug-ins. There's a cool, shared white-board for collaborative drawing over your Skype call, and a Chinese checkers, a game I used to play a lot with my parents.

What's also cool, of course, is that these plug-ins are viral. Before you can use the whiteboard with other people, they also have to download them. I imagine that makes Skype quite an exiting place to develop software for, right now. A chance for your apps. to take off ... very, very quickly.

There seems to be a torrent-style file-sharing software. Hope it's better than Skype's relay. If it is, and it really is like BitTorrent, it could be very useful.

There also seem to be a couple of plug-ins for finding people and asking for live advice. This is really significant ... Skype could end up really running the "live" web. Especially if they get live people searching. Essentially anyone will be able to set themselves up to sell live phone services without having to work for a call-centre, a phone-sex company or the Mechanical Turk.

What I find strange, though, is that Skype still don't seem to have sorted out some kind of PayPal integration that would allow people to pay for services directly over their call. I don't see a plug-in for that, but it seems obvious. And an obvious revenue stream for Skype. Skype don't charge for the calls themselves but at least skimming something off pay-by-the-minute services should be possible, if they get involved in the payment part. And as both Skype and PayPal are owned by EBay ...

Not sure whether this is actually already going on and I just missed it; or if Skype have a blind-spot about this; or if it's going to be announced next week; or if there's some glaring technical or legal impediment I'm too dumb to notice.

Any ideas from the readers?

John Battelle's Searchblog: Alexa (Make that Amazon) Looks to Change the Game

Amazon just became the first internet giant to open up their search engine index as a platform for others to build applications on.

People have been paying attention to Yahoo (because it keeps buying into all the trendy stuff) and ignoring Amazon. But it's actually the latter who are doing all the really weird crazy stuff at the moment (like the mechanical turk)

Remember, Google's book search undermines the book publishing industry (and indirectly Amazon). This is Amazon's counter-offensive.

BTW : Battelle says "Why didn't I predict it?" but isn't this more or less what Dave Winer has been calling for for a while now? (ie. a no restrictions, open search core for people to build applications on? )

In practice, how different is this from the APIs of Google and Yahoo that things like RollYo are built on?

michael parekh on Google's "Click to Call"

Interesting story.

Google's latest ad-words let advertisers opt to receive phone calls (via Google's Jabber based VOIP).

Ultimately, this is in competition with SkyPal and Amazon's Mechanical Turk as a way of creating an online market for services with a live human at the end.

michael parekh on Google testing "click to call" advertising

Amazon Mechanical Turk

A new war. The Amazon Mechanical Turk vs. Skypal (as another platform to sell human services)