I got up at the crack o’ 10:45 am on Thanksgiving morning to try and get a $100 xBox 360 from Amazon.com. They only had 1000 at that price, going on sale at 11:00am sharp, and virtually every video game blog in the Universe had reported on it. So it was going to be tough. Read the rest of this entry

Today I got an email from Amazon Web Services about their new service, the Amazon Mechanical Turk.

I had to rub my eyes and double-check the sender to make sure I was not seeing things. I wasn’t. Amazon Mechanical Turk is a service that farms out remedial automated tasks to humans, with an API that mimics artificial intellegence.

I think this has to be about the stupidest name for a service I’ve ever heard. I’m familiar with the infamous chess-playing automaton turk . I read about it when I was young and have been quite fond of it ever since. Last year I actually worked on a design for a toy partially based on the turk. And I’m a huge fan of Amazon as well. But to name an automation service after it is just asking for trouble. It requires a long-winded explanation for people who aren’t familiar with story, and it’s not exactly a name that rolls off the tip of the tounge.

Overall, my experience with the Amazon Mechanical Turk was an entertaining one, if not from just the silly name.

How Amazon Mechanical Turk works:

Let’s say I have a website that needs tens of thousands keyword-tagged photos. I have the photos, but they’re not tagged. To do it alone would be a huge task for me. It would also be a huge pain to hire people to tag them for me. After all, I’m not a people-person. What I really need is a way to automate it. And need a way to automate the automation, becuase I’ll be adding new photos all the time. The Mechanical Turk system allows me to automate the process with humans. I can build a process that accepts photos and passes it to Amazon, who in-turn finds the people, gets the data tagged, and gets it back to me.

So, that’s it in a nutshell. There’s a second part, their website where they match people up with tasks. I decided to see what kinds of tasks they were offering and how much they paid. Amazon was offering “image alignment” for 3 cents a photo. I decided to log in and see how it worked.

I spent the next 30 minutes doing image alignment, which consisted of matching photos to a street address for Amazon’s Blockview yellowpages and map. For every match I made, I got 3 cents. Whooo hooo! I ended up matching 82 images and made $2.46 , although I skipped a bunch because I could not reconize the address.

I have so many questions and conserns about the Mechanical Turk that I don’t know if I can explain it all here. What’s the quality like? Who’s actually going to spend hours rating photos for just a few cents? Who’s going to take a service serious with a name like Mechanical Turk.

here’s their site:

Amazon Mechanical Turk

I’m tagging this as bad user interface because of the silly name.