3pointD.com

Occasionally, having an anchor corporate sponsor provides me with a good excuse to do something I wouldn’t normally be able to do — like blog about the 10,000 sheep that were created by online workers hired through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, an online employment exchange for micro-tasks that need to be done by a person but which can be parcelled out via the Web. [Via we-make-money-not-art.] Actually, this is not so very un-3pointD at all.

One of the things we discussed at the Metaverse Roadmap was the possibility that the future of work, for many people, might come to resemble a game like World of Warcraft, in which small tasks are made available to whomever wants to take them up. The jobs pay commensurately small amounts, but they pay immediately. We came to this turn while contemplating what the world might be like if large portions of the population prefered to stay jacked in to the virtual world for large amounts of time. How would they earn an income? Our answer: Through micro-tasks like those available on the Mechanical Turk.

In fact, I don’t see why some enterprising gold farmer isn’t harnessing the power of a virtual world this way already (other than that the Terms of Service don’t allow it). Imagine a Human Intelligence Task (Amazon’s dumb term for the little jobs that get posted on the Turk) that asked you to farm 10 gold pieces in an MMO. Any time you wanted to make a little money, you could farm for a while, turn in your gold to your micro-employer, then go back to playing the game. Possibly, in some future economy where this paid a reasonable rate, you could make enough money to cover your subscription fees. It would at least create a more open market, where the best employers get the most attention from workers. And because the work is being “pulled” by the laborers, it puts more control in their hands as well.

Obviously, this idea has been floating around long enough for Amazon to have created an entire service around it (launched November 2 of last year). And there’s nothing in the concept that requires a virtual world to make it work. But virtual worlds could be an excellent place for a labor market like this. Why not harness the power of connectivity and community that VWs provide in this way? You already have a broad community of interest and large transaction volume. And in a place like Second Life, residents also have the tools of creation at their fingertips. After that, all you need is a tool that would enable residents to request tasks of whatever size and a mechanism for paying them. This is possible today: The Amazon Mechanical Turk comes with its own Web services APIs.

Is this a good idea? Who knows. But it’s an interesting one. I’d also be interested to know what the volume of business being done via the Turk is at the moment. The applications to virtual worlds aren’t quite clear in my mind, but I’m sure they’re there. Feel free to weigh in with any thoughts, if you’ve made it this far through the post.

And I thought I was blogging those sheep because it was a slow news day.