I was catching up on my feeds today and I noticed that FogCreek sofware recently released v2.0 of Copilot
Fog Creek CopilotSM is a simple and inexpensive service that allows friends, relatives, and customers to help each other solve their computer problems by letting one person temporarily connect to the computer of the other over the Internet. Fog Creek Copilot is inexpensive, fast, easy, secure, and works with any firewall or router without having anything to install or any settings to configure.
It’s a cool idea but there is one glaring problem — What if you don’t know anyone who can fix the problem? Copilot needs some kind of matching service to help people find professionals to fix their computers. There could be a “MySpace/Facebook” system for all the professionals to have profiles to show what they know and a history of work. What if they setup a way they could pay these people, have it bill by the minute/hour or something? Oh wait, there’s already something out there that does that.
FogCreek should make a “Copilot” widget for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Isn’t the task of fixing someones email a HIT (human intelligence task)? So people could ask for help on the co-pilot site and then workers on AMT could do the work from the HIT screen. Obviously some smarts would have to go into the work flow to ensure the customers were getting trusted professionals doing the work.
Might be a way for FogCreek to get more business flowing through this service. I like it because that means people who can fix problems can easily find work to make some extra money. I’d love for this to have existed when I was in college. Good idea/bad idea?
Jon
March 7th, 2007
Dude, this is actually a pretty good idea. Maybe not the Mechanical Turk part, but the idea of having a service to match people (noobs) up with people (puter dudes) to provide tech support for a fee. Well done, captain ideas.
Brandon
March 7th, 2007
Thats a great idea! They’d have to do something about the monthly payments or the day passes, though. Perhaps take a little bit off your earnings for fixing someones computer?
I’ve lost all faith in AMT. It would be nice to set something up like experts-exchange and one of those rentacoder sites … people can bid on fixing a problem and the problem owner can view the bidders profiles and decide (based on # of problems fixed and feedback) who to pick …
BPAndrew
March 8th, 2007
@Jon - you’d be able to make some sweet money if that existed eh?
@Brandon - Yea maybe experts exchange or RAC would be a better host to this. I just love the idea of MTurk, I don’t think I’ll ever give up on those guys.