+1. I've spent 5x the amount of time trying to understand this than I would for anyone else-- because I think Joshua is brilliant. But I'm still flummoxed. Is it like mechanical turk? Tasty Labs could really benefit from a designer, methinks. Not just to make it pretty, but to empathize with/advocate for their audience.
It is through criticism like this that we continue to hone the message. Thank you.
The problem is that what we have built is very, very broad, so narrowing it is difficult.
The platform lets you send people little bundles of UI and have them interact. That's incredibly broad and vague!
So here are some examples: You could get them to take pictures of all the storefronts in a town. You could send them realtime surveys to go along with a television show. You could have them rate sessions at a conference. You could have someone be notified when they walk onto a car dealership and offer them the chance to look up car prices.
Explaining this with one line has been very difficult so far. My favorites so far are: 1) Turn a passive audience into engaged particpants. 2) Turn your audience int your army.
It seems like human.io solves a very rare problem: "I have a lot of people who will do whatever I ask them to, but organizing the result of their efforts is difficult".
This is a very real problem for the people that have it. Imagine you have a following of hundreds of thousands of people (like joshu actually does). You could do a lot to help yourself and others simply by posting one tweet. But then you have to deal with lots of replies from different people in different formats, keep track of it over time, set up consistent systems for recognition and reward, etc.
human.io turns all of that into an api like process. But you have to explain that idea to a very large number of people, when only a tiny percentage of people even understand what the problem is like. I can understand how this would be difficult to "explain". It seems like the problem isn't so much the message, but the fact that such a specific problem has to be explained to a wide audience.
I had the exact opposite reaction. I know that not many people interact with their community outside of a tweet so it could seem like a rare problem but this API makes it easier to interact which should make interacting on this level less rare. If that makes any sense.
Take his photo scavenger hunt, if that was the only thing this thing was good for it would be a great tool for any major brand.
There are lots of organizations that have a huge number of interested followers but relatively little organization. Examples that come to mind are newspapers, political parties, towns, schools, viewers of a sports event, etc.
That's why I keep using the word "audience" - it is the traditional word for this kind of relationship, I think.
This is a great idea, but I had to read the blog post, read the home page, then re-read the blog post to fully grasp why I'd want to use it, and now I have a great idea for how to utilize it for something I'm building. There has to be a better way to get the idea across, but I'm not sure what it is. The "Some things you can do" part of the homepage was the most useful part for me. Emphasize that more?
> The "Some things you can do" part of the homepage was the most useful part for me. Emphasize that more?
That's a good idea, thanks. I'll move the section up higher.
We're trying to tell two stories on that page. The developer story: an easy way to write simple apps and target them at specific people via some criteria. The user story: join interesting activities by companies and developers you enjoy or want to help out.
I am excited by this for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that it seems like a true joshu project--simple infrastructure that uses simple approaches to engage crowds in collaborative activities. With del.icio.us it was enabling structured discovery via folksonomy, with human.io it is enabling broadening the reach of crowdsourcing. (If only I could somehow coin the term turksonomy and have it make sense in this context.)
A couple of crazy ideas would be to use this to perhaps improve upon that niche that Flickr and Twitter are sometimes used for, which is crowd sourcing collection of digital media for some event (like a concert, conference or news event). Instead of showing live tweets as a screensaver at a conference, show images collected via human.io.
I also think there is a huge potential for creating interactive narratives and even games.
When I try to explain the idea to people, though, the question is always "what is in it for the worker?". With delicious, the creation of a good folksonomy that added value to the ecosystem was simply a side effect of the selfish benefit of keeping track of your own bookmarks. That's why I think for human.io to go viral to the point where you have a large and engaged workforce, you need to find its "win/win" proposition. It could simply be the game aspect (see games with a purpose) or maybe a give a little/get a little dynamic.
Great stuff...can't wait to see how this one evolves.
My first thought exactly. This could be epic for so many things that are not practical today. Maybe the incentive could just be: To get the data, you have to participate in creating it.
Would love a "how long are the lines at the nightclubs" task
Edit:
Maybe it's worth looking at how private torrent sites do this, there has to be an incentive to seed or it doesn't work. There's basically a ratio that can't drop too low, or a point system where you start >0. So you have to give X to get Y. Maybe let the users pay for "points".
This looks very intriguing but I have a bunch of questions.
Do all the end users, the "humans" have to have the human.io mobile app in order to run "apps"? Is there a way to embed the human.io app/task UI somewhere else?
Is the intention to mostly have lots of people use the human.io mobile apps? Or is this going to be more API based where developers can embed human.io apps into other places?
Is the photo scavenger hunt example an app or a task or is it an app with a single task?
Currently, the users must have the app to run the tasks. We don't currently have a way to embed the task UI. I worry that if we whitelabel it we won't see network effects.
For what it's worth, people coming in to do the photohunt app are doing other people's tasks, too.
We want to start with getting people to use the mobile apps. We are looking at other targets in the future (browsers already work. televisions? cars?)
The scavenger hunt is an app with a single task. Apps are really a developer notion - users don't see apps in the UI currently, only tasks.
This may change in the future; inside the one task are several subtasks: suggest a hunt, rate a photo, take a photo. and the "take a photo" part lets you mark a hunt as inappropriate.
In the future these could be four or five simple tasks once you have accepted the larger "task."
I like the idea, but it isn't clear to me what motivates the users to participate. Can the developer offer some sort of financial incentive to the users?
I agree, I'm unsure of what the hook is for someone to download the mobile app and use it. Perhaps it would make sense if human.io came as a framework developers could import in their existing apps?
With this, they could potentially send out notifications to just their audience when participation would be useful. Completing tasks could also be a micropayment allowing the developer to give the user some sort of reward (like unlocking bonus features).
I think there are going to be different kinds of users and different kinds of task publishers. Each will utilize different motivations around what they do. We are working on a way to allow this. I think that payments are good, but there's also coupons/offers, gamification or social standing, participatory privilege, etc.
I worry that if we do micropayments for microtasks we'll end up in a very specific pigeonhole that isn't insanely interesting.
I think this is awesome! As soon as I saw the photohunt I knew the massive implications of this. I feel like this could be one of those things 'cell phones were made for'. I'm curious about how people will use it.
The UI on the android app could use a little work though. I'm sure you'll get to that soon enough. Nice job!
we run a small organization that picks fruit growing on trees all over atlanta and donates it to local homeless shelters. we have many fruit picking events that are logistically tough to organize as the trees are all over the city and in all different stages of ripening. if we had a way to break it down like: "you go check this one tree (here's the address), you go check that one, etc, and we'll build the pick around that" it'd be much much easier on us and way more engaging with folks (people love what we're doing, but we have a limited number of events and spaces within those events).
Yeah. If you have geocoded points you could have them check nearby trees. When one person does the task, you pull the task etc. do you want to try prototyping it?
It'd be nice if you could pay users so you don't just become another bothersome mosquito in their pocket.
For example: Say I need something from the county records of some place far from me but I need them quickly. I place a human.io call to pay $50 to whomever takes a picture of a series of documents first. That could be huge.
Human.io's job is to sell the developers. The developer's job is to sell the humans. I think I have that right.
Imagine if the Chicago Tribune wanted to build data-driven apps from people on the streets downtown. Just like if they wanted to do telephony apps they'd have to spend $300k getting Asterix wired up properly and Twilio makes it work out of a Sinatra app; similarly, my sense is, Human.io is trying to do that for people-driven apps.
My suggestion for human.io description:
We provide brains.Scalable and real.
Need data to prove something?
Need feedback on your idea?
Need an idea to work on?
Human.io can help.
You create a task we provide crowd.
Don't need any of these?
Join and help others.Fun is guaranteed!
The same basic thing seems to exist as an open source platform as well: http://pybossa.com/ - if you're going to base it off the interest of people to participate, why not apply that to the full stack?
Looks like a great idea. Completely off-topic, for curiosity sake - when I go to download it through the App Store, the language options are English, German, Spanish and Northern Sami??
Have you thought about making this a web-app (or Facebook app) too? Sure, you won't be able to get Geo-tagged photos but not all the tasks require mobile devices.
It's a great idea and I hope the term "publishers" isn't limited to businesses. I always wanted a little service like this I could ask questions to: "I parked my car at the corner of Housten and Orchard, can someone confirm I don't have any tickets." "I heard XYZ closed down, can someone tell me if they're still in business."
But in my opinion:
>> It allows you to script with humans as easily as you would script with software.
[+] [-] pud|13 years ago|reply
But I wish there were a specific example of what it does.
Something that starts with, "Let's say you run a site and need [x]. Here's how human.io can help you with that..."
Otherwise it's too much work for me to try and figure out what it does, or how I'd use it. Even though I'm sure it's great - because Josh made it.
[+] [-] webwright|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshu|13 years ago|reply
The problem is that what we have built is very, very broad, so narrowing it is difficult.
The platform lets you send people little bundles of UI and have them interact. That's incredibly broad and vague!
So here are some examples: You could get them to take pictures of all the storefronts in a town. You could send them realtime surveys to go along with a television show. You could have them rate sessions at a conference. You could have someone be notified when they walk onto a car dealership and offer them the chance to look up car prices.
Explaining this with one line has been very difficult so far. My favorites so far are: 1) Turn a passive audience into engaged particpants. 2) Turn your audience int your army.
[+] [-] aditya|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hooande|13 years ago|reply
This is a very real problem for the people that have it. Imagine you have a following of hundreds of thousands of people (like joshu actually does). You could do a lot to help yourself and others simply by posting one tweet. But then you have to deal with lots of replies from different people in different formats, keep track of it over time, set up consistent systems for recognition and reward, etc.
human.io turns all of that into an api like process. But you have to explain that idea to a very large number of people, when only a tiny percentage of people even understand what the problem is like. I can understand how this would be difficult to "explain". It seems like the problem isn't so much the message, but the fact that such a specific problem has to be explained to a wide audience.
[+] [-] ljd|13 years ago|reply
Take his photo scavenger hunt, if that was the only thing this thing was good for it would be a great tool for any major brand.
[+] [-] joshu|13 years ago|reply
That's why I keep using the word "audience" - it is the traditional word for this kind of relationship, I think.
Does that make sense?
[+] [-] natrius|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulrademacher|13 years ago|reply
That's a good idea, thanks. I'll move the section up higher.
We're trying to tell two stories on that page. The developer story: an easy way to write simple apps and target them at specific people via some criteria. The user story: join interesting activities by companies and developers you enjoy or want to help out.
[+] [-] joshu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firebones|13 years ago|reply
A couple of crazy ideas would be to use this to perhaps improve upon that niche that Flickr and Twitter are sometimes used for, which is crowd sourcing collection of digital media for some event (like a concert, conference or news event). Instead of showing live tweets as a screensaver at a conference, show images collected via human.io.
I also think there is a huge potential for creating interactive narratives and even games.
When I try to explain the idea to people, though, the question is always "what is in it for the worker?". With delicious, the creation of a good folksonomy that added value to the ecosystem was simply a side effect of the selfish benefit of keeping track of your own bookmarks. That's why I think for human.io to go viral to the point where you have a large and engaged workforce, you need to find its "win/win" proposition. It could simply be the game aspect (see games with a purpose) or maybe a give a little/get a little dynamic.
Great stuff...can't wait to see how this one evolves.
[+] [-] gizzlon|13 years ago|reply
My first thought exactly. This could be epic for so many things that are not practical today. Maybe the incentive could just be: To get the data, you have to participate in creating it.
Would love a "how long are the lines at the nightclubs" task
Edit:
Maybe it's worth looking at how private torrent sites do this, there has to be an incentive to seed or it doesn't work. There's basically a ratio that can't drop too low, or a point system where you start >0. So you have to give X to get Y. Maybe let the users pay for "points".
[+] [-] joshu|13 years ago|reply
Your ideas (conference photos, narratives, etc) are really good ones. Want to prototype some?
I'm not sure that viral is necessary. Delicious was never viral in any way. Just useful.
("turksonomy" - hee)
[+] [-] albertsun|13 years ago|reply
Do all the end users, the "humans" have to have the human.io mobile app in order to run "apps"? Is there a way to embed the human.io app/task UI somewhere else?
Is the intention to mostly have lots of people use the human.io mobile apps? Or is this going to be more API based where developers can embed human.io apps into other places?
Is the photo scavenger hunt example an app or a task or is it an app with a single task?
[+] [-] joshu|13 years ago|reply
For what it's worth, people coming in to do the photohunt app are doing other people's tasks, too.
We want to start with getting people to use the mobile apps. We are looking at other targets in the future (browsers already work. televisions? cars?)
The scavenger hunt is an app with a single task. Apps are really a developer notion - users don't see apps in the UI currently, only tasks.
This may change in the future; inside the one task are several subtasks: suggest a hunt, rate a photo, take a photo. and the "take a photo" part lets you mark a hunt as inappropriate.
In the future these could be four or five simple tasks once you have accepted the larger "task."
[+] [-] brucehart|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tumultco|13 years ago|reply
With this, they could potentially send out notifications to just their audience when participation would be useful. Completing tasks could also be a micropayment allowing the developer to give the user some sort of reward (like unlocking bonus features).
[+] [-] joshu|13 years ago|reply
I worry that if we do micropayments for microtasks we'll end up in a very specific pigeonhole that isn't insanely interesting.
[+] [-] JulianWasTaken|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshu|13 years ago|reply
Hit me with some better ideas?
[+] [-] par|13 years ago|reply
The UI on the android app could use a little work though. I'm sure you'll get to that soon enough. Nice job!
[+] [-] joshu|13 years ago|reply
What's specifically wrong with the android app, so I can make sure Paul & co see them?
[+] [-] durkie|13 years ago|reply
we run a small organization that picks fruit growing on trees all over atlanta and donates it to local homeless shelters. we have many fruit picking events that are logistically tough to organize as the trees are all over the city and in all different stages of ripening. if we had a way to break it down like: "you go check this one tree (here's the address), you go check that one, etc, and we'll build the pick around that" it'd be much much easier on us and way more engaging with folks (people love what we're doing, but we have a limited number of events and spaces within those events).
[+] [-] joshu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mynegation|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clavalle|13 years ago|reply
For example: Say I need something from the county records of some place far from me but I need them quickly. I place a human.io call to pay $50 to whomever takes a picture of a series of documents first. That could be huge.
[+] [-] tptacek|13 years ago|reply
Imagine if the Chicago Tribune wanted to build data-driven apps from people on the streets downtown. Just like if they wanted to do telephony apps they'd have to spend $300k getting Asterix wired up properly and Twilio makes it work out of a Sinatra app; similarly, my sense is, Human.io is trying to do that for people-driven apps.
[+] [-] revicon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaronbrethorst|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sharma|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pudo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benatkin|13 years ago|reply
The API sounds good but I may not actually try it until the UI is more compelling.
[+] [-] joshu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tren|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chime|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmahemoff|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miniatureape|13 years ago|reply
But in my opinion:
>> It allows you to script with humans as easily as you would script with software.
Is a disgusting phrase.
[+] [-] sakai|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t_hozumi|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rgrieselhuber|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshu|13 years ago|reply
We built it first. Now we're figuring out what it can do, exactly :)