I want to know nownow!
I’m really starting to dig Amazon’s new mobile answer service, nownow.com. The concept is to allow mobile users to get answers to questions without having to search the web. They just e-mail nownow from their cell phone (SMS support coming soon), and the questioun is researched by Mechanical Turk workers. Up to 3 answers for each question sent and the user has the option to rate the answers in order to encourage quality over time.
I was a bit skeptical at first. The service is free during the invitaiton-only beta, but the yet-to-be-announced pricing could be as high as $0.25 per question. I can see how something simple like “What’s the phone number of Piecora’s pizza in Seattle?” would probably net accurate responses, but couldn’t see myself paying to receive 3 e-mails with the same number. What I didn’t expect, was the quality of answers for more detailed questions. For example, when I first heard about the lenghtening of daylight savings time in the US, I was at lunch. I sent in a question and within 15 minutes or so had 3 detailed and comprehensive answers on my cell phone.
Workers are paid $0.02-$0.03 per answer. That’s it. I was wondering why they would do such good research for so little, so I sent in a question and asked*. While anyone who goes to Mechanical Turk can answer a question, I get the sense that there’s a sort of community of people who work these on a regular basis. They mentioned the sense of helpfulness, knowing they are providing information that an individual needs (as opposed to something that will be aggregated, etc). There’s also a pool of bonus money that’s distributed each week to the workers with the most “great” answer votes. Unfortunatley, not everyone bothers to vote (one worker estimated about 1/3 vote). It’s as simple as replying to the email you receive with “great”, “like”, or “lame”. I’m going to bet a reminder to vote gets built into the system soon.
