Joshua Schachter, who in past life had founded social bookmarking service delicious and sold it to Yahoo, has released Human.io, newest offering from his new 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 humans. 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
