Mechanical Turk was launched in 2005, with the purpose of completing Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for Amazon's internal business processes. Over time, the marketplace for this kind of task completion grew and external companies were allowed to post projects, too. But other than the obscure needs of a handful of businesses, what other uses does Mechanical Turk have? I wondered this when I returned to the site recently to play with the application. I already knew the app could be used for less than great purposes such as spamming and social bookmarking, but I discovered that Mechanical Turk could also be useful for image tagging and transcription, like those from Casting Words.
Two weeks ago I read a post on ReadWriteWeb about a company named SmartSheet and their new Smartsourcing tool. While I have used Google docs and a few other online document sharing services, I had never heard of SmartSheet. Even after using the application I still don't care about the online document management as much as the simplification, automation and ultimately, streamlined process for submitting and gather results of HITs. After reading that post and returning to MT, I had an epiphany: I could use SmartSheet with Mechanical Turk for real tasks.
So, how does it work? Recently, we had a list of names that we wanted to compile email and postal addresses for some outreach. While we could have spent the time to research each name and find the data ourselves, we tested the project out with Mechanical Turk. After the very easy data submission process, the results were fast and pretty cool: data started flowing back into the spreadsheet and one by one, our spreadsheet was filled with the email and mailing addresses we needed. There's no need to get the data from Amazon and manually enter it back in, and there's is even a nice little utility to reject what MT finds in case it doesn't meet your requirements, and it sends it back out for work.
While I'm sure SmartSheet is doing lots of cool stuff, and in some cases even better than stuff than Google, I don't care about that. Why? Because the draw of the application and their best source of revenue will come from the integration with Mechanical Turk.
Bottom line? SmartSheet better start promoting this and getting people hooked before someone comes along with a nice little tool that does the same and uses Google or another online document system as the backend.
