Want to make some money in crowdsourcing but don鈥檛 have time? Maybe you should start 鈥渢witching鈥�.
Workers who pitch in to complete crowdsourcing projects can earn a small fee for undertaking simple tasks such as captioning photos of famous landmarks. But tasks on computers often take too long and people soon lose interest.
Now an app called Twitch, developed by Michael Bernstein at Stanford University in California and his colleagues, replaces a phone鈥檚 unlock screen with an interface for crowdsourcing. Instead of swiping to unlock the phone, you can complete tasks such as choosing the better of two stock photos or verifying if a 鈥渇act鈥� on a website like Wikipedia is true.
Advertisement
Bernstein鈥檚 team put and recruited 82 of the people who downloaded it. These users completed a total of 11,200 tasks in three weeks. The team thinks the idea will catch on because each task is so fast: a regular swipe-to-unlock move took users 1.4 seconds and the quickest task 鈥� picking one of six pictures to say what you were doing at that moment 鈥� took 1.6 seconds.
This negligible additional mental load gives such apps great potential when it comes to crowdsourcing, says team member of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who will reveal the app at a in Toronto, Canada, in April .
No time commitment
鈥淐rowdsourced processes in general might be tedious, but when shown one at a time on Twitch鈥檚 mobile unlock screen, it encourages participation without enforcing any time commitment,鈥� Vaish says. 鈥淪urveys can now be created by anyone and important things can be learned quickly and from a large amount of people using mobile phones.鈥�
Samuel Johnston, spokesman for , a London based company using phone apps to draw up crowdsourced maps of phone signal strength, finds the idea behind Twitch compelling.
鈥淭witch鈥檚 process of solicitation is uniquely mobile in that it allows tasks to be tailored to an individual鈥檚 location and ties into the frequent and rapid interactions individuals have with their mobile devices,鈥� Johnston says. 鈥淭he killer use-case for Twitch may well be consumer surveys. Allowing coffee shops or the like to ask brief questions to immediately gauge the success of promotions, new products and store layout, perhaps with some kind of compensation given based on the questions answered.鈥�
However, Johnston says Twitch will face competition from apps that crowdsource data automatically, for example, by guessing a phone user鈥檚 speed for traffic apps and using a phone鈥檚 sensors to guess what they are doing.
