Mechanical Turk has a bright tomorrow.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a marketplace which lets people who have small online tasks that need to be done and people who wish to do small online tasks come together. Turkers can often choose from a wide variety of tasks including transcriptions, image tagging and marking, trivia question writing, and information gathering. At present, the site works pretty well, especially for those with tasks to do as they can get away with offering very little money (task payouts are generally measured in cents rather than dollars, though keep in mind that you might be able to complete many tasks in a short amount of time). I use the site regularly and I expect some groups of people, such as college students whose variable schedules make steady employment difficult or stay-at-home parents who are looking for online revenue streams, will become heavy users of Mechanical Turk in the future if they are not already. At the moment, what is holding the site back (and it is still in beta) seems to be some aspects of its interface.

To be more specific, at present looking for tasks means cycling through a long list of every task on the site. This includes tasks which a given turker might never consider doing. You can organize the list in a few ways, but in all cases the entire list is generated with the exception that those tasks which the turker is not qualified to do (a qualification can often be earned by completing a qualification test but also could be linked to something like the geographic location of the worker) can be filtered out. What I would like to see is the option for workers to blacklist some employers or task types so that they do not have to see tasks from those employers or those task types again in the future. A task categorization scheme is much needed. Some workers undoubtedly specialize in some tasks, such as transcription -- it would make sense for these workers to be able to enter a transcription section and see all available transcription tasks from all employers. This will make things a lot easier for the workers!

Recently I've noticed a proliferation of tasks by bloggers in which a small amount of money is paid for a turker to make a comment on a blog. This is an excellent use of this marketplace, in my opinion, because it allows the turker to do something he or she might enjoy doing anyway and get paid for it. The way Mechanical Turk is set up enables a turker to "view" a task before completing it, so typically the turker will be able to see what blog he or she is being asked to post on before accepting the task. So, the potential is there for people interested in a certain areas to post comments to interesting blogs related to those areas and get paid for it. The bloggers and turkers both win!

I'm hesitant to make grand predictions on a blog so young, but here's one nonetheless: Mechanical Turk will improve the interface and will become huge. OK, one addition to that: if Mechanical Turk itself does not come huge, some other similar service will. There are just too many tasks that can be done online and too many people who are hungry for online work for these needs to go unfilled. Someday, it's going to be big business!