Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Brother, can you spare a dime...
Wow. I mean, wow!!! Pardon the "Tom Peters'-style" overuse of exclamation points, (not to mention the word "wow" itself), but Amazon may have come up with a way to solve a really thorny problem. If ever you've been in the market for an infinite number of monkeys to type out all the great books, or other such task, Amazon has provided one possible solution. Their new Mechanical Turk service, or "artificial artificial intelligence" uses the power of idle minds connected to the Internet (much like SETI or the Human Genome Project tries to use idle computer processing power) to solve problems that aren't well suited to computers. Amazon calls these efforts Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs. For example, Amazon has photos of locations in various cities and asks its Mechanical Turks (the folks who accept the HITs; the name is related to ancient computing machine history), to select the photo that best represents those locations. Amazon, or the company/person that requested the HIT, pays a small fee to the person completing it. Judging by the HITs on the site currently, those fees average a few cents each. Wild, huh?
While the service is still beta testing, the long-term implications are pretty interesting, particularly in the context of where Amazon pictures its business. For instance, Amazon's original tagline, some 10 years ago, was "The Earth's Largest Bookstore." More recently, Jeff Bezos noted in a letter to Amazon's customers posted on Amazon, "Our company-wide obsession for creating the best possible shopping experience will not change..." (http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/17/176060/images/letters/letter_10anniv.gif). Within their media kit, Amazon gives further insight into where the company sees itself going. The page notes, "Amazon.com strives to be Earth's most customer-centric company where people can find and discover virtually anything they want to buy online." (empasis mine; retrieved from http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-mediaKit). Clearly, Amazon has bigger things in mind these days instead of just being a bookstore; however, anyone who says, "duh, Amazon's been growing beyond that space for a long time" isn't necessarily considering what Amazon has become. They're becoming less a retailer, and more like eBay. Their intent isn't so much to be a store that consumers buy from, so much as it is to become a platform, or more appropriately, the platform, through which sellers sell and buyers buy. Mecahnical Turk shows this as well as anything because it now moves Amazon into fulfillment in the labor market. Admittedly, it's not the labor market most of us recognize (and conceivably not even one most of us need); however, it may also illustrate another example of the Internet creating an industry space where none existed before.
So, great, right? Maybe. Maybe not. I see at least a couple of flaws with regard to Amazon's move. Probably the most minor flaw is related to the compensation offered. Given the scale of the HITs, and the price offered by companies seeking assistance, I'm not sure how many people will find the effort worth their time. Micropayments, long touted by Jakob Nielsen and others, as something that the 'Net needs badly, require an Amazon account, and again, may not represent enough money to entice users to participate.
Most notably, though, is its separation from users' passion, which Amazon has successfully leveraged in the past to provide better services to its customers. Amazon.com does a phenomonal job of creating user communities through its Reviewer system, Associates program (affiliate marketing/Web-commerce platform), Purchase Circles, and Lists (both its Wish Lists and its consumer-created lists, which really use the same mechanism, but change the spin). Amazon gets all the labor it wants to create significant amounts of content, and gets it all for (mostly) free. Obviously, Amazon has costs for creating these tools, and they pay commissions for its Associates program. Still, the majority of labor is provided by users who do it because of their passion for the topic. MySpace.com has built an entirely successful business model tapping almost exclusively into its users' passion to leverage free labor. I'm not sure that users are looking for another job when they come home at the end of the day (and I shudder to think if its used by individuals at work), and I'm less sure that they'll be willing to do it for minimum wage (assuming $0.03 per task, two tasks per minute). These might only represent minor issues, or might spell doom for the Mechanical Turk service. Amazon may well have found that the only way to get people to accept these tasks is by offering some coin of the realm; I assume a better model would offer more compelling renumeration. Time will tell.
On an unrelated topic, you might want to check out Digg.com, where I first read about Amazon's latest venture. Similar to Slashdot, though a bit less nerd-y. Until next time... ¶ 7:53 AM
While the service is still beta testing, the long-term implications are pretty interesting, particularly in the context of where Amazon pictures its business. For instance, Amazon's original tagline, some 10 years ago, was "The Earth's Largest Bookstore." More recently, Jeff Bezos noted in a letter to Amazon's customers posted on Amazon, "Our company-wide obsession for creating the best possible shopping experience will not change..." (http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/17/176060/images/letters/letter_10anniv.gif). Within their media kit, Amazon gives further insight into where the company sees itself going. The page notes, "Amazon.com strives to be Earth's most customer-centric company where people can find and discover virtually anything they want to buy online." (empasis mine; retrieved from http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-mediaKit). Clearly, Amazon has bigger things in mind these days instead of just being a bookstore; however, anyone who says, "duh, Amazon's been growing beyond that space for a long time" isn't necessarily considering what Amazon has become. They're becoming less a retailer, and more like eBay. Their intent isn't so much to be a store that consumers buy from, so much as it is to become a platform, or more appropriately, the platform, through which sellers sell and buyers buy. Mecahnical Turk shows this as well as anything because it now moves Amazon into fulfillment in the labor market. Admittedly, it's not the labor market most of us recognize (and conceivably not even one most of us need); however, it may also illustrate another example of the Internet creating an industry space where none existed before.
So, great, right? Maybe. Maybe not. I see at least a couple of flaws with regard to Amazon's move. Probably the most minor flaw is related to the compensation offered. Given the scale of the HITs, and the price offered by companies seeking assistance, I'm not sure how many people will find the effort worth their time. Micropayments, long touted by Jakob Nielsen and others, as something that the 'Net needs badly, require an Amazon account, and again, may not represent enough money to entice users to participate.
Most notably, though, is its separation from users' passion, which Amazon has successfully leveraged in the past to provide better services to its customers. Amazon.com does a phenomonal job of creating user communities through its Reviewer system, Associates program (affiliate marketing/Web-commerce platform), Purchase Circles, and Lists (both its Wish Lists and its consumer-created lists, which really use the same mechanism, but change the spin). Amazon gets all the labor it wants to create significant amounts of content, and gets it all for (mostly) free. Obviously, Amazon has costs for creating these tools, and they pay commissions for its Associates program. Still, the majority of labor is provided by users who do it because of their passion for the topic. MySpace.com has built an entirely successful business model tapping almost exclusively into its users' passion to leverage free labor. I'm not sure that users are looking for another job when they come home at the end of the day (and I shudder to think if its used by individuals at work), and I'm less sure that they'll be willing to do it for minimum wage (assuming $0.03 per task, two tasks per minute). These might only represent minor issues, or might spell doom for the Mechanical Turk service. Amazon may well have found that the only way to get people to accept these tasks is by offering some coin of the realm; I assume a better model would offer more compelling renumeration. Time will tell.
On an unrelated topic, you might want to check out Digg.com, where I first read about Amazon's latest venture. Similar to Slashdot, though a bit less nerd-y. Until next time... ¶ 7:53 AM
