Anyone who has played though some of the more popular casual games on social networks like Facebook has likely come across ‘Offers’ — sponsored promotions you can sign up for or surveys you can take to earn virtual currency instead of having to pull out your credit card. Depending on the survey, these can be fairly time consuming, and sometimes it feels like handing over your Email will lead to a lifetime of spam messages. Today Gambit is looking to offer an alternative to these traditional offers: it’s partnering with TC50 finalist CrowdFlower to allow applications to offer bite-sized chunks of cloud-based labor to users.
CrowdFlower launched at this year’s TechCrunch50 with the intention of helping businesses outsource mundane or repetitive tasks that could easily be performed by just about anyone — things like filtering through images for material that is clearly copyrighted. Now companies will be able to sign up for a task on CrowdFlower and choose to outsource these tasks both to CrowdFlower’s established community, and to Gambit’s payment platform, which is used to power hundreds of games across various social networks.
Signing up for a task is simple. After clicking on the ‘jobs’ tab, users are presented with a brief overview of their task, along with an estimate of how long it will take. After you’ve completed your task, you’re rewarded with your virtual currency, provided you get enough of your responses correct. To check accuracy, the system presents the same task to multiple users and checks to see how many of their responses match. Businesses submitting tasks can pay more to ensure greater accuracy (in other words, their task will be presented to more users).
The new feature is called Gambit Tasks, and it gives gamers an alternative to the surveys and promotions they’ve been seeing over the last few years. These are especially appealing to gamers who don’t have credit cards, which can include younger users and some international audiences. Of course, with these younger and international users comes the concern of ensuring that tasks are performed accurately — CrowdFlower has a reputation system that trusts users less the more mistakes they make, which should help with this. It’s certainly a promising feature and Gabmit thinks it has a lower barrier to entry than other offers, which makes sense — I know I’d rather do a little bit of work than sign up for a promotion that I don’t really want.
I think the only worry is going to be people not accurately completing the work. They will only try to finish as fast as possible.
Unlike MT, there is no “feedback” you care about- The only goal is to get the prize.
Dan-
Indeed — many people just try to finish the work as fast as possible without doing accurate work. That’s why CrowdFlower includes quality assurance.
http://crowdflo...eneral/examples
(I work for CrowdFlower)
Brilliant!! So glad to see the evolution of the offer space.
Very smart – and the right way to do it.
Quality HAS TO severely suffer here. At least with the paid offers, you have to enter your credit card and commit, that’s pretty binding. But with this method, users will do whatever they can to fly through the work with no care on their final score, so long as they get the points.
I think this is a brilliant idea and hope to see this on social games soon. The current offers aren’t sustainable IMO as the leads are of such low quality marketers are going to need to rethink their spend.
I’m a big fan of this already. A little constructive feedback, however. I think the time-to-complete estimate is very off-putting. First off, it seems hard to believe that finding 4 addresses will take me half an hour. Secondly, social gaming is all about instant gratification. The idea of doing a thirty minute chore for a token amount of reward points kinda defeats the purpose. Hopefully, these are tasks that can be done ten minutes or less.
As has been pointed out, there’s going to be a lot of incentive to game the system. It seems like CrowdFlower is going to check the accuracy of data based on other users’ responses. If a bot is doing multiple tasks at the same time, it can ensure that it’s duplicating answers to same questions…
Congrats… CrowdFlower is a great company with some very bright people running the show.
(I don’t work for CrowdFlower)
Awesome! Can’t wait til the mafia creates tasks so that you can do real world tasks (like money drop off) to earn virtual coins that you can play Mafia Wars with!
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better mashup, partnership or collaboration. Amazing friggin job!