Mike Culver, Amazon Web Services, and Mechanical Turk.

Tonight we had a really great turnout at the Chicago Ruby users group. Mike Culver from Amazon.com was in town to talk about their webservices: S3, EC2, and Mechanical Turk. The crowd was 35 strong (only 1 other ThoughtWorker besides myself, what gives?). Recruitment pays for the pizza at these meetings and I am happy to say there was a good response from the attendees. After the presentation I was surrounded by a group of 5 - 6 developers asking questions about Ruby at ThoughtWorks and Jobs at TW. But enough about how great it is that TW gets to associate itself with the Local Ruby Community once a month, and how great it is to have free pizza, I'm also really excited about some of the WebServices (WSes) Amazon is offering.

Most of you have probably heard about S3 which is a storage WS that allows you virtually unlimited storage for dirt cheap ($0.15 per GB per Month) and EC2 which allows you to purchase computing power on demand (think scaling out not up). But did you know about the SQS web service? I didn't. It stands for Simple Queue Service and is a scalable, distributed, messaging queue. More info at aws.amazon.com. The amazon WS I liked the most is called the Mechanical Turk (see mturk.com. It is THE BOMB! Have I been living under a rock? How have I not heard of this?

Mechanical Turk is what they call Artificial Artificial Intelligence. AAI? The service allows you to hire people for a micro-contract. And gives you access to the service via WSes. An example of such a contract would be "I'll pay you .10 cents to look at a picture and tell me if it is acceptable to be viewed by a minor." Essentially amazon has created a webservice for harnessing people power. People looking to make micro-money fulfilling micro-tasks (apparently there are lots of these) are on one end and a WS is on the other. Mike showed us a live site that uses MechTurk for making transcriptions of podcasts. A sample transaction is as follows: You send them 40 minutes of audio and 2 hours later they hand you a perfect written transcript. Here is what happens behind the scenes: The website takes the audio, breaks it up into small pieces, and puts the pieces up as HITs on the mechanical turk website. People transcribe the little piece of audio and are paid their small contract fee. Each snippet is transcribed again by someone else. The site takes the transcriptions and does a diff on them. If there are significant differences a third mechanical turk merges the transcriptions. This happens for all excerpts and they are finally reassembled into the full transcript. So audio in, text out. Pretty amazing, eh?

Links:

• Here is a halarious example of how to make $80,000 using Mechanical turk. The SheepMarket All 10,000 of those sheep were drawn by people on Mechanical turk for 2$ each. He is selling them for 20$ each. Sound stupid? He has sold over 4,000 of them so far...


• Here is the developer site for amazon webservices: http://aws.amazon.com


• Here is the mechanical turk blog: http://www.mechturkblog.com


• Here is mechanical turk, make money in your spare time: http://www.mturk.com

I'm interested to hear what people think about what Amazon is doing. It seems to me that with SQS, S3, and EC2 Amazon is positioning itself to be the equivalent of a utility on the Internet. It is a worldwide computer for your storage and processing, and users only pay one tiny increment at a time, thus only paying for what they use. Has anyone used these much? What were your impressions? Is Mechanical Turk going to usher in a new age of industry? The post-post-industrial era when people sit around earning their pay one $0.10 contract at a time? Are we putting ourselves into cages like so many little lab rats? A bunch of computers are feeding us menial tasks and we are hitting the feeder bar over and over to get that $0.10 worth of food. Egad! The movie Office Space has just been made obsolete. (And when I say just I mean one year ago, because that is how long the turk has been out.)