The problem with Mechanical Turk

Guy Kawasaki, who is a blogger/author that every startup CEO needs to read, seems to have fallen in love with The Turk. Maybe one of the companies he backs will actually find a good use for it.

Have you done a search and seen the jobs being offered? Most of them are simple SEO work - writing filler to wrap adsense around and confuse the search engines, or “voting up” something or other. And the payrates offered are atrocious.

Update: After marking up this screenshot. I figured out how to get a list without doing a search, just clicking on HITs, you can go here. There are only 193 “HITs” posted right now. None of them pay more than $5. That’s not even worth the time I took to make the screenshot, let alone the time I took to write this post. But, I guess I’m a startup CEO, not a starving third worlder! But frankly, anyone with a clue and with an internet connection knows that their time is worth more than this. BTW (obligatory plug) if you’ve got a clue and an internet connection (and Firefox), you really ought to try the Interclue Beta.

Essentially, it was an idea that sounded great and original and interesting and got Amazon a lot of attention when they released it, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten used in the way they might have hoped. I guess there are a lot of ideas like that. Maybe things will change, but I imagine that they’re looking at the lack of uptake and pondering that to make it worthwhile they would have to be doing 100x more business, so why bother when they’ve got so much else on. (note to self: finish post about Google Answers…)

But as for Amazon trying stuff non “book” related, I’m vastly more impressed with S3, EC2, SQS, etc than I am with Mturk. We are planning to migrate Interclue onto S3 and EC2, once we have launched (Soon! I promise!) and got some more investment underneath us. Amazon is a great company, doing great things.

Last minute thought: I wonder if there’ll be an upsurge in mturk uptake on the supply side after they start rolling out millions of OLPCs…