In the example the company provides on its product page, the user publishes a series of small work orders for research on the names and profiles of top CEOs around the country. That kind of drudgery would take hours to perform, but with Mechanical Turk it can be done on the cheap, quickly.

How should a person feel about the Turks though? We admit that we were a little concerned at first; the last thing we want is to use some creepy neo-colonial crap like ODesk.com, which sends customers hourly webcam photos and screenshots of their contracted overseas labor in action, usually with their eyes flared with surprise at the intrusion.

Mechanical Turk seems different though. There appears to be a real art to using it well, and that is one thing that concerns us about the viability of Smartsheet's product.

We get our Mechanical Turk advice from Andy Baio's Waxy.org. Baio recently paid Turkers 50 cents each to upload a picture of themselves with a paper sign explaining "why you Turk." The responses were incredibly humanizing and more than a little amusing.

Would you want a project management app that let you leverage those peoples' time at a low price? That sounds like a pretty intriguing idea to us.

In case you're unfamiliar, Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourced marketplace for tasks. A person needing work done can set up a HIT (human intelligence task) - the small job they need done. Others come along to perform the HITs, earning micro payments along the way. In this way, businesses, developers, and other individuals have access to an affordable, scalable workforce

Unfortunately, it appears that the convenience of the Turk marketplace has some appeal to social media spammers, who are now using the site to earn Diggs, bookmarks, and other social recommendations they do not deserve. Here's an example:

Anyone who uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk has no doubt come across similar HITs posted by spammers. For example, this guy is requesting someone create 29 social bookmark accounts from 29 sites:

A search for "bookmark" on MT today displays 48 results (at the time of writing) where spammers are requesting social bookmarking of their web site. Search for "digg" and you'll find people paying for Diggs.

Of course, whenever there is a system in place (like social media) that can help drive traffic to a web site, there will be those people who use it to generate traffic for their spam sites. But why are they able to use Amazon Mechanical Turk to do so? Shouldn't Amazon police the Turk to shut down these spam accounts?

Mechanical Turk Still Has Promise, Despite Spammers

However, this doesn't mean that Mechanical Turk doesn't hold any value - it's still an innovative and useful tool for many. In fact, members of the HCI community (Human Computer Interaction) have begun to use Turk for user research studies with great success. This work has inspired others like open source advocate, Chris Messina, to do the same. He plans to use Turk for usability studies on OpenID and OAuth. Since the HITs are spread out among many, the cost of performing these studies is greatly reduced. Being able to crowdsource research is a great way that MT can be used today, and one that will have a big impact on the future, too.

Thanks to Brynn Evans, a graduate student in the Department of Cognitive Science at University of California, San Diego for discovering this and thanks to open source advocate Chris Messina for sending it along to us.

Out of the two announcements, the payment services service are the most interesting. Amazon gives its customers two options: Checkout by Amazon or Amazon Simple Pay. Simply Pay is basically a stripped-down version of the full Checkout package and doesn't include the one-click checkout and most of the order management features such as calculating sales tax and shipping rates, creating packing slips, or collecting buyer feedback. Simple Pay, on the other hand, allows sellers to use more payment options, including credit cards and bank accounts. Checkout by Amazon can only accept credit cards.

These services are basically an extension of Amazon's "Flexible Payment Service." This service (which has been in beta for quite a while now) gives developers a set of API that hook into Amazon's payment services. One area that Amazon is especially targeting with this is micro-payments.

With these new services, Amazon is going up against Google Checkout, as well as most credit card merchant accounts. However, with Amazon's already established reach among consumers, as well as the level of trust that most consumers have when it comes to working with Amazon, both Checkout and Simple Pay have a distinct advantage over their competition. For merchants, Amazon's Checkout service also offers a wider range of services than most credit card processors or Google Checkout currently offer. Google Checkout, however, is generally cheaper than Amazon's offerings - though it also offers fewer services.

Streamlined Mechanical Turk

Amazon's Mechanical Turk is basically a way to outsource menial tasks that would be too computing intensive or simply need human intelligence to be completed (Amazon calls them "Human Intelligence Tasks"). Applications reach from tagging photos to rewriting trivia questions, or digging a particular story.

With this latest update, 'requesters', as Amazon calls them, can look forward to a simpler user interface that will guide them through the process more effectively. Amazon has also created a set of more efficient tools to track and monitor the work that is being done.

The project took 5 months to complete and involved contributions from 51 different countries. Because some turkers participated more than once, there weren't truly 10,000 different artists contributing to the project, but it appears that most countries had unique visitor rates of above 60%. The end result was a reproduction of a $100 bill that cost $100 to create.

"The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, 'crowdsourcing,' 'virtual economies,' and digital reproduction," according Koblin and Kawashima on the project web site.

The completed artwork is being displayed on the "Ten Thousand Cents" web site as an interactive video depicting all 10,000 pieces of the bill being drawn at once. A limited edition signed print (presumably signed by Koblin and Kawashima, not thousands of random turkers), is also available on the site for $100, with all proceeds going to the One Laptop Per Child project.

A video about "Ten Thousand Cents" is below.

The Mechanical Turk service, which Amazon released in November of 2005, is a web service that allows companies to outsource simple, generally repetitive tasks to human workers for small sums of money. It now has 100,000 workers in 100 countries and counts corporations such as comparison search engine PriceGrabber among its users.

The service got mainstream attention when Amazon used it to help organize a virtual search for missing Microsoft researcher Jim Gray last year.

A quick survey of open assignments on the Mechanical Turk site reveal a handful that pay up to $15.00 but the vast majority paying out under $1, and many paying only a few cents. There are over 31,000 so-called Human Intelligence Tasks available on the site right now, but scanning through them by price makes it easy to imagine that collectively they're still probably not worth as much as what some of Amazon's executives can find in their couch cushions. So it's not hard to see how some people could accuse Amazon of creating a virtual sweatshop labor force.

Who Are These People?

A recent demographic survey done through Mechanical Turk sheds some surprising light on just who these "Turkers" are, however. Contrary to the pictures painted by some media outlets that Amazon has assembled a third world workforce of people willing to work for pennies, most Turkers are actually from the United States. According to the survey, 76.25% are from the US, with just over 8% from India.

Further, the vast majority of Mechanical Turk participants are under 40 years of age, and over 50% of them have bachelor's degrees. About half also make over $25,000 per year -- and a surprising percentage make over $40,000 per year.

So why participate in the Mechanical Turk program -- one which nets most people under $600 per year -- if you're well educated, already have a paying job, and there are so many other ways to make money? One answer is that people find the tasks offered on Mechanical Turk fun. The Amazon service provides people with time wasters that also pay a little money and for younger users, especially, the service offers an easy way to make a little pocket change.

A recent New York Times article relates a number of anecdotal stories about why people participate, as does an earlier post on Panos Ipeirotis's blog (Ipeirotis is responsible for the demographic survey referenced in this post). Clearly, very few people participate in Mechanical Turk solely to make money. Most people do it out of boredom, to make a little pocket change, or because they are limited in the type of work they can do due disability or some other reason.

Have you ever used Mechanical Turk to outsource a task? Have you ever participated as a worker? What was the result? Let us know in the comments.