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Introducing human.io
- JulianWasTaken 14y agoThis is really cool, and I'll definitely be checking it out, but "If Twitter is HTML, then Human.io is CGI." has to be the worst pitch line ever.
- joshu 14y agoI'm not in love with it. It's hard to come up with a good line. Hit me with some better ideas?
- jcater 14y agoHuman.io: The real-world interaction engine. Human.io provides a robust platform for creating mobile activities for people to perform in real life. Quickly create interactive apps that take full advantage of mobile GPS, video, and photo capabilities, promoting rich responses to surveys, games, or contests. Plus, using our integral filtering API, you decide exactly who gets to see and run your app. Push out your app to people based on location, demographics, or your own custom filters.
- joshu 14y agoThis is pretty great. Thank you.
- JulianWasTaken 14y agoYeah, nice, that is much better -- and joshu, hope the original comment didn't make it sound like that was the focus of what I got out of checking it out -- I really like the idea :).
- joshu 14y agoIt was good feedback. Don't apologize.
- sakai 14y ago"Script with humans" made me shiver a bit. Evocative copy to be sure, but perhaps a bit too Orwellian.
- joshu 14y agoTotally happy to try something else. Any ideas?
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- pud 14y agoJoshua is brilliant and I want to love this! But I wish there were a specific example of what it does. Something that starts with, "Let's say you run a site and need [x]. Here's how human.io can help you with that..." Otherwise it's too much work for me to try and figure out what it does, or how I'd use it. Even though I'm sure it's great - because Josh made it.
- aditya 14y agoMaybe this'll help? http://photohunt.human.io/ http://photohunt.human.io/
- pud 14y agoHuman.io helps you embed photos into a long web page? (I know that's not what it does. But just illustrating my point. Don't make me, the user, figure it out. Just tell me.)
- aditya 14y agoOh, right on. The landing page needs to be optimized, but Joshua didn't do an Ask HN: post so he never got our amazing feedback :-)
- joshu 14y ago(we did Show HN round once before. we did a bunch of polishing based on the feedback, and have more to do.)
- opendomain 14y agoJoshua, I have been playing the Photohunt and am currently in the lead - it is very fun! Thanks for building the Human API - I have many great ideas using this and have been taking notes to help improve the process. Contact me Hacker @ myusername ORG
- joshu 14y ago
- natrius 14y agoThis is a great idea, but I had to read the blog post, read the home page, then re-read the blog post to fully grasp why I'd want to use it, and now I have a great idea for how to utilize it for something I'm building. There has to be a better way to get the idea across, but I'm not sure what it is. The "Some things you can do" part of the homepage was the most useful part for me. Emphasize that more?
- paulrademacher 14y ago> The "Some things you can do" part of the homepage was the most useful part for me. Emphasize that more? That's a good idea, thanks. I'll move the section up higher. We're trying to tell two stories on that page. The developer story: an easy way to write simple apps and target them at specific people via some criteria. The user story: join interesting activities by companies and developers you enjoy or want to help out.
- joshu 14y agoThat is good feedback. We will work on it more. Thank you.
- mmahemoff 14y agoIt seems to be Mechanical Turk for mobile users.
- miniatureape 14y agoIt's a great idea and I hope the term "publishers" isn't limited to businesses. I always wanted a little service like this I could ask questions to: "I parked my car at the corner of Housten and Orchard, can someone confirm I don't have any tickets." "I heard XYZ closed down, can someone tell me if they're still in business." But in my opinion: >> It allows you to script with humans as easily as you would script with software. Is a disgusting phrase.
- joshu 14y agoPublishers -> someone who publishes tasks or has an audience of some sort. Not necessarily businesses. Hmm. It allows you to get people to do a sequence of actions (provided the right motivation.) What would express it better?
- clavalle 14y agoIt'd be nice if you could pay users so you don't just become another bothersome mosquito in their pocket. For example: Say I need something from the county records of some place far from me but I need them quickly. I place a human.io call to pay $50 to whomever takes a picture of a series of documents first. That could be huge.
- aaronbrethorst 14y agoIsn't that Zaarly?
- joshu 14y agoOr taskrabbit. Think of human.io as more of the platform you might build one of these on. We're not reselling a labor pool, we're making it possible to stay engaged with one, especially for folks that have large audiences that aren't particularly engaged (newspapers, etc.)
- tptacek 14y agoHuman.io's job is to sell the developers. The developer's job is to sell the humans. I think I have that right. Imagine if the Chicago Tribune wanted to build data-driven apps from people on the streets downtown. Just like if they wanted to do telephony apps they'd have to spend $300k getting Asterix wired up properly and Twilio makes it work out of a Sinatra app; similarly, my sense is, Human.io is trying to do that for people-driven apps.
- brucehart 14y agoI like the idea, but it isn't clear to me what motivates the users to participate. Can the developer offer some sort of financial incentive to the users?
- tumultco 14y agoI agree, I'm unsure of what the hook is for someone to download the mobile app and use it. Perhaps it would make sense if human.io came as a framework developers could import in their existing apps? With this, they could potentially send out notifications to just their audience when participation would be useful. Completing tasks could also be a micropayment allowing the developer to give the user some sort of reward (like unlocking bonus features).
- joshu 14y agoThis is exactly correct. We expect publishers to talk about the task to be done and the motivation for doing so as the primary thing (and the fact that it happens to run on the human.io client or in a browser or whatever as secondary.)
- joshu 14y agoI think there are going to be different kinds of users and different kinds of task publishers. Each will utilize different motivations around what they do. We are working on a way to allow this. I think that payments are good, but there's also coupons/offers, gamification or social standing, participatory privilege, etc. I worry that if we do micropayments for microtasks we'll end up in a very specific pigeonhole that isn't insanely interesting.
- mynegation 14y agoThe more I look at what is happening with technology the more I am likely to declare Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End a prophetic book.
- joshu 14y agoYeah. I hope this is a good thing.
- rgrieselhuber 14y agoWhat inspired you to build this? It might help us understand it better.
- joshu 14y agoMechanical Turk + Twilio + Phones. We built it first. Now we're figuring out what it can do, exactly :)
- 147 14y agoWhere'd you get that pretty header for the photo hunt page?
- tren 14y agoLooks like a great idea. Completely off-topic, for curiosity sake - when I go to download it through the App Store, the language options are English, German, Spanish and Northern Sami??
- joshu 14y agoThe app uses PhoneGap, which has a wacky default build template. It will be fixed in the next release.
- par 14y agoI think this is awesome! As soon as I saw the photohunt I knew the massive implications of this. I feel like this could be one of those things 'cell phones were made for'. I'm curious about how people will use it. The UI on the android app could use a little work though. I'm sure you'll get to that soon enough. Nice job!
- joshu 14y agoThanks! What's specifically wrong with the android app, so I can make sure Paul & co see them?
- par 14y agoNothing specifically, just feels like it needs a little more UI loving. I felt like tapping the results on the survey widget was a little cumbersome. Maybe the buttons could be wider or more responsive.
- chime 14y agoHave you thought about making this a web-app (or Facebook app) too? Sure, you won't be able to get Geo-tagged photos but not all the tasks require mobile devices.
- joshu 14y agoWe can run in a browser already. We'll probably get to it, but we're mostly focusing on mobile for now.
- Sharma 14y agoMy suggestion for human.io description: We provide brains.Scalable and real. Need data to prove something? Need feedback on your idea? Need an idea to work on? Human.io can help. You create a task we provide crowd. Don't need any of these? Join and help others.Fun is guaranteed!
- firebones 14y agoI am excited by this for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that it seems like a true joshu project--simple infrastructure that uses simple approaches to engage crowds in collaborative activities. With del.icio.us it was enabling structured discovery via folksonomy, with human.io it is enabling broadening the reach of crowdsourcing. (If only I could somehow coin the term turksonomy and have it make sense in this context.) A couple of crazy ideas would be to use this to perhaps improve upon that niche that Flickr and Twitter are sometimes used for, which is crowd sourcing collection of digital media for some event (like a concert, conference or news event). Instead of showing live tweets as a screensaver at a conference, show images collected via human.io. I also think there is a huge potential for creating interactive narratives and even games. When I try to explain the idea to people, though, the question is always "what is in it for the worker?". With delicious, the creation of a good folksonomy that added value to the ecosystem was simply a side effect of the selfish benefit of keeping track of your own bookmarks. That's why I think for human.io to go viral to the point where you have a large and engaged workforce, you need to find its "win/win" proposition. It could simply be the game aspect (see games with a purpose) or maybe a give a little/get a little dynamic. Great stuff...can't wait to see how this one evolves.
- joshu 14y agoCredit where credit is due - Paul had the idea. I kept talking about labor pools and mturk etcetera being the future. Your ideas (conference photos, narratives, etc) are really good ones. Want to prototype some? I'm not sure that viral is necessary. Delicious was never viral in any way. Just useful. ("turksonomy" - hee)
- firebones 14y agoOkay, not viral, but I think there has to be some psychological hook for the worker that gives them benefit for the small barter of time and effort. Novelty gets you in the door, maybe boredom, but then again if I am bored, I can always just start answering election year push polls. Some way for workers to see value besides karma or a pay rate of $3/hour is what I haven't figured out yet. Viral in the classic sense might not have described delicious, but I will say that I had a much richer and more interesting and more professionally useful social network of followers and followed people on delicious than any network since...Twitter is the heir for this kind of network-filtered firehouse of interesting stuff, and Quora almost could get there, but delicious had more impact per byte than either of those. I always considered it somewhat viral in the sense that I had maybe a dozen coworker colleagues I followed plus a smattering of random people who turned out to essentially be high-signal, curating SMEs for various interest areas I needed. I am working on prototyping ideas as time allows, but still working though the examples so far.
- hooande 14y agoIt seems like human.io solves a very rare problem: "I have a lot of people who will do whatever I ask them to, but organizing the result of their efforts is difficult". This is a very real problem for the people that have it. Imagine you have a following of hundreds of thousands of people (like joshu actually does). You could do a lot to help yourself and others simply by posting one tweet. But then you have to deal with lots of replies from different people in different formats, keep track of it over time, set up consistent systems for recognition and reward, etc. human.io turns all of that into an api like process. But you have to explain that idea to a very large number of people, when only a tiny percentage of people even understand what the problem is like. I can understand how this would be difficult to "explain". It seems like the problem isn't so much the message, but the fact that such a specific problem has to be explained to a wide audience.
- joshu 14y agoThere are lots of organizations that have a huge number of interested followers but relatively little organization. Examples that come to mind are newspapers, political parties, towns, schools, viewers of a sports event, etc. That's why I keep using the word "audience" - it is the traditional word for this kind of relationship, I think. Does that make sense?
- albertsun 14y agoThis is a problem I've been thinking about a lot. The trick is the audience we have comes to us through the channels we've created. It seems unrealistic for us to get them all to use the human.io app.
- hooande 14y agoI guess I was trying to say that someone already has to have a large audience before human.io is really valuable. I can definitely see how it would help organizations, even local organizations. The issue of how to organize and utilize that audience is a big deal. It's just something that the majority of people don't have to deal with. They might see the site from the perspective of "how is this useful to me?" and see it in the wrong context.
- albertsun 14y agoThis looks very intriguing but I have a bunch of questions. Do all the end users, the "humans" have to have the human.io mobile app in order to run "apps"? Is there a way to embed the human.io app/task UI somewhere else? Is the intention to mostly have lots of people use the human.io mobile apps? Or is this going to be more API based where developers can embed human.io apps into other places? Is the photo scavenger hunt example an app or a task or is it an app with a single task?
- joshu 14y agoCurrently, the users must have the app to run the tasks. We don't currently have a way to embed the task UI. I worry that if we whitelabel it we won't see network effects. For what it's worth, people coming in to do the photohunt app are doing other people's tasks, too. We want to start with getting people to use the mobile apps. We are looking at other targets in the future (browsers already work. televisions? cars?) The scavenger hunt is an app with a single task. Apps are really a developer notion - users don't see apps in the UI currently, only tasks. This may change in the future; inside the one task are several subtasks: suggest a hunt, rate a photo, take a photo. and the "take a photo" part lets you mark a hunt as inappropriate. In the future these could be four or five simple tasks once you have accepted the larger "task."
- sazpaz 14y agoI think that you should consider white labeling. Or perhaps not necessarily white labeling, but releasing SDKs to allow to use the platform from third-party apps. Obviously many app developers and companies could benefit from having it available from their own apps. I can also see value for it in the academic world. Academia is starting to dip their toes in the crowd research and this could be very valuable. But again, I don't see a benefit to actual users to download the human.io app, it seems as an unnecessary hassle. Having it available from other apps allows third-parties to offer their own benefits.
- durkie 14y agosuper excited about this! we run a small organization that picks fruit growing on trees all over atlanta and donates it to local homeless shelters. we have many fruit picking events that are logistically tough to organize as the trees are all over the city and in all different stages of ripening. if we had a way to break it down like: "you go check this one tree (here's the address), you go check that one, etc, and we'll build the pick around that" it'd be much much easier on us and way more engaging with folks (people love what we're doing, but we have a limited number of events and spaces within those events).
- joshu 14y agoYeah. If you have geocoded points you could have them check nearby trees. When one person does the task, you pull the task etc. do you want to try prototyping it?
- benatkin 14y agoI was hoping to see a more polished, more native UI in the iOS app. I was also hoping to see faster iteration of the app (more updates) early on. The API sounds good but I may not actually try it until the UI is more compelling.
- joshu 14y agoWe've made a lot of progress in the app. Did you take a look? The UI is quite a bit more polished.
- t_hozumi 14y agoInteresting project! What is the first idea which you realized this kind of app is really needed for?
- pudo 14y agoThe same basic thing seems to exist as an open source platform as well: http://pybossa.com/ http://pybossa.com/ - if you're going to base it off the interest of people to participate, why not apply that to the full stack?