It could have been great...

In the last few days I've been taking a look at Amazon's Mechanical Turk http://mturk.com, and I've been disappointed to say the least... I had hoped - for a brief moment - to actually make some money solving tasks (called HITs), but that's not how the cookie crumbles.

Mechanical Turk is a system where one set of people (the Requesters) can upload simple tasks that pay money to the internet, and allows another set of people (the Workers of Turkers) to solve those tasks and earn the money.

When I first heard about the Mechanical Turk project I envisioned a truly global marketplace of internationally based Requesters and internationally based Workers. By international I mean that requesters and turkers could in principal be situated anywhere on the planet, completing HITs or creating HITs on equal terms, but that is not how it works :

• Amazon now requires requesters to be U.S. based - Amazon says: "At this time Mechanical Turk does not support Requesters from countries outside the United States". This point is critized on this blog post by Phillipp Lenssen.
  
• You can sign up as a turker no matter which country you live in, and you can complete HITs. But if you're not a U.S. citizen you cannot get access to the money you've earned - Amazon offers: "Transfer your earnings to your U.S. bank account or to your Amazon.com gift certificate balance". So you can still get paid in books I guess.
• Amazon have implemented qualifications, which is a means for allowing workers to specialize in completing certain types of HITs, but there's not a wide variety of qualifications available (only 220 with many repetitions, 29-jan-2008). I'm a computer science student, and I could in principle work on any number of coding projects etc. But such qualifications are not readily available.

Another problem is that the amount of money earned per HIT is ridiculously low. I earned $0.04 in five minutes, which is equivalent to approximately $0.50 an hour, not even enough to buy a chocolate bar. So why even bother to write this? I write this because I think Mechanical Turk is a great idea, only an idea that Amazon has not implemented satisfactory. I expect the problems facing an implementer are (among other things):

• Taxes -Einstein presumably said: "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax" and I guess it's not a simple task to transfer wages for labour seamlessly around the world. I don't think something like PayPal would solve the problem, as labour would still need to be taxed somehow. Workers must report their income as self-employment income (Wikipedia).
• Few requesters. There seems to be only a few companies dominating the HITs market, which means that there is not enough competition between requesters to drive up the wages. This was pointed out by the paylancer blog, and I expect this problem to be partly due to Amazon only accepting U.S. requesters.

Of course Amazon can not be blamed for failing to providing business opportunities for the entire world, but it's still a shame that mturk is so flawed, because it's a great idea.

See also:

• Wikipedia on Mechanical Turk
• Business Week article on Mechanical Turk
• New York Times article on Mechanical Turk
• Turker Nation - forum for turkers
• Good introduction to Mechanical Turk