Mark Wallace takes it even further - what if those tasks were parcelled out to people within a virtual world, such as Second Life (SL)? The tasks may take from a few minutes to an hour to complete, the player submits the finished product and is paid immediately.
This scenario leads naturally to the question: who ties everything together? Will the generalists migrate to be the hub around which an ever-changing cast of specialists revolves?
In a way we've seen this happen already in outsourcing. There are even virtual companies, that outsource everything, R&D, manufacturing, fulfillment and billing. Mark suggests that this model can be scaled down infinitely.
I'm putting together a simple postcard that I can use to follow-up with prospects. One person has created a drawing, another provided some copy and I'm pulling them both together for the card. Is this how most work will be done in the future?
Update: A commenter to Mark's post says that Amazon's Mechanical Turk isn't widely used at all.
Mechanical Turk is still a "beta" service, which may be why not that many people are using it yet. Actually, I checked it out and it looks like lots of people are using it, and there really are thousands of jobs in it right now. Ok, they pay like $0.01 but it's hardly empty.
Posted by: Marcus | May 23, 2006 11:32 PM | Permalink to Comment