… and Amazon Mechanical Turk still doesn’t have an RSS feed. For a service built on top of XML that’s pretty weak. They expect their distributed-mobile-hightech workforce to check the website every day?
Since I’m knocking on them here is another idea I had a while ago. Amazon Web Services should rebrand into a new company. I think the “Amazon” part of it confuses the people who would authorize/investigate partnership deals. Maybe they should break all this stuff away from the Amazon brand and get some sales people knocking on doors. It wouldn’t hurt to upgrade their sites with an updated look and feel + “fancy” features like RSS. Oh and make it so Canadian guys like me can post work on there!
Brandon
December 10th, 2006
You can post work on there! You just have to earn the money by completing tasks, first
The concept of AWS is really good, however, its implementation is horrible. In the year that you’ve known that, you could’ve made a much better version yourself.
However, I don’t think AWS is meant to be like how you and I vision it to be. I think its a shameless method to launch their own websites and schemes. Be sure to take a look at http://www.nownow.com. I’m assuming their master plan is to not really care about or support other developers, but to use AWS internally for the most part
BPAndrew
December 10th, 2006
Maybe their approach is to just knock products out there and see what the response is like? Can’t say I blame them because thats what I’m doing myself.
However AMT is a bad ass idea and it needed to be worked on. I’ve seen a few API updates but the thing needs way more before it starts catching on with the right people.
You were big into it last year too right? It’s sad that the excitement died off, they could have done something really incredible with all that momentum back then.
Brandon
December 10th, 2006
Yeah, thats probably their plan. nownow.com seems like a great move, especially since google answers has closed up shop. That only leaves sites like experts-exchange.com and yahoo answers. And both of those sites are annoying (however, yahoo is free).
AMT has really been frustrating, especially since we’re Canadian. I was going nuts trying to mturk my xbox 360, but then I found out I couldn’t cash out. I ended up selling my $340 account on ebay for $320 :D. After that I started tossing around ideas for developing for AMT, but around that time I was referred to your blog and decided to avoid the issue. I looked back into it a bit later, hoping some progress was made… some has, but not nearly enough
Valerie
December 10th, 2006
RSS feeds for Turk wouldn’t be useful. How often would you update your feed maybe once an hour? If a good hit shows up…wouldn’t it already be gone by the time you checked your feed and saw it? I think they do expect you to check every day.
And you might want to look at the BusinessWeek cover story from a couple of weeks ago it’s all about Amazon’s web services. and it will tell you why they are never going to split off into another company!
BPAndrew
December 11th, 2006
Valerie, good point about the RSS feed. My thinking is that building a feed is so trivial it should just be there, many people use them for many different reasons.
For instance - what about people like me who want to see what types of work come on AMT? It would also be useful for a historical approach.
Oh and I will track down that business week, thanks for the tip!