Joshua Schachter, who in a past life founded the social-bookmarking service delicious and sold it to Yahoo, has released Human.io, the newest offering from his startup, Tasty Labs. Last year, Tasty Labs launched Jig.com, a “market place for things people need.”
What is Human.io? To me it appears to be a micro-task platform that uses mobile devices as a way to distribute and aggregate tasks. Schacter defines it as a platform for doing micro-tasks. In a blog post announcing the launch he writes:
Human.io provides a simple way to allow a publisher to turn a passive audience into a mobile army of participants. This allows publishers to easily create missions and activities to get people involved more directly than just reading stuff on a screen. If Twitter is HTML, then Human.io is CGI.
Human.io lends itself to small, simple tasks: Vote on an item, take a picture of a storefront, etc. It allows you to script with humans as easily as you would script with software. It also offers easy access to the sensors on the phone: GPS, camera, and so on.
Even at first blush I could see this becoming a really useful tool/service for creative collaboration. Now time to dig into this a little but more.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Joi Ito under Creative Commons license
