Seen that? - Amazon Mechanical Turk: Human Processing For Web 2.0

Filed in archive Best of on February 11, 2010

Amazon Mechanical Turk: Human Processing For Web 2.0 The Social Networking Weblog

I've often said that humans are better than algorithms, but it looks like Amazon has taken that idea literally - they've created a web service that lets you solve problems using human minds. The Mechanical Turk has an API and pays human beings for completing tasks. From the Amazon description: "Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate "Artificial, artificial intelligence" directly into their processing by making [...] Read More


Amazon Ignites Distributed Search Innovation The Social Networking Weblog

I was a bit bullish on the Amazon move to open up their Alexa search API. It appears that people are just starting to use the Amazon Search API to create interesting indexes. I can't imagine any of these examples being greenlighted at the big search companies, because they are such small problems. But, they are certainly small problems that are nice to have solved: From the Alexa - Web Discovery [...] Read More


Paying for Web Services as a Utility The Social Networking Weblog

I've written on this subject previously. The problem with web services is that most are designed by geeks for geeks. Very few are designed by business people for business use. Amazon changed that when they introduced web services that businesses can access and pay-for as they use. Not only have they introduced pay-as-you-go web services. They've made it real easy to get started and real easy to access your usage [...] Read More


Amazon Mechanical Turk Java Entrepreneur

Amazon surprised me recently with their Amazon Mechanical Turk service. To summarize my understanding of the service, it is a marketplace for developers to request human interaction to accomplish tasks that computers cannot easily perform. An example they provide is a human being identifying specific objects inside an image. Amazon provides the Web Services API, pricing structure and the ability to track transactions. Developers pay no up front fees to [...] Read More


AT&T to enter ranks of cloud providers The CIO Weblog

It looks as though Sun isn't the only big player with spare network capacity anxious to get in on the cloud computing hype. AT&T has announced, by way of a deal with the US Olympic Committee that it will be offering storage and network services to corporate customers. The service, called Synaptic Hosting, is described only the the most general terms on the company's site. It appears to be a combination [...] Read More