This morning, our business development manager forwarded me an e-mail that was posted to the ASAE technology listserv.  The person who posted the e-mail had a question about Microsoft Excel.  In an effort to help him, as well as the larger ASAE community, I spent a few minutes researching an answer to his question.  I used a couple of different resources and finally came across a newsgroup posting (via Google Groups) that answered his question.  What’s interesting to me is not the question itself, but the process he used to get his question answered.

I don’t know the person who posted the e-mail personally; let’s call him John for now.  John, like many of us, probably has certain people within his circle of friends, relatives and co-workers that he turns to for help on certain issues.  For me, I have a friend and former co-worker that I look to for advice on the latest cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players and other high-tech gadgets.  This friend likes keeping up-to-date on the hottest tech toys, and I value his opinion highly.  Let’s assume for a minute that John, our answer seeker, went to his trusted circle and was unable to get the question answered.  Where does he turn to next?  At some point, John decided to post his question to the ASAE community (via the listserv).  I’ll reveal at the end whether or not his question was answered.  In the meantime, let’s talk more about harnessing the power of crowds.

By sending his question to the listserv, John was indeed harnessing the power of crowds.  According to Wikipedia, listservs have been around since 1986.  Originally, they were used to send e-mails to lots of people at a single time.  Now, they’re used by hundreds of groups and organizations, not only to distribute e-mails from the group leaders to group members but also as a means to foster e-mail-based communication between group members.  Now there are hundreds of different ways to harness the power of crowds; I’ll touch upon a few of the more noteworthy types now.

Bulletin board systems (BBS) and Usenet newsgroups were two of the earliest computer-based group discussion systems.  I fondly remember dialing up BBS systems on my Apple II personal computer with my 300-baud modem.  Needless to say, I was overjoyed when I received a 1200-baud modem for Christmas one year.  That meant I could download things four times as fast!  The vast majority of BBS systems were made extinct by the growth of the World Wide Web and the Internet; however, some, such as The Well, have survived and morphed into internet-based discussion forums.

Established in 1980, Usenet newsgroups are still in use today.  Originally it began as a system of posting articles to well-defined topics called newsgroups, which themselves are logically organized into a subject hierarchy.  At its peak, there were hundreds of newsgroups and many thousands of regular users.  While other types of web-based applications have passed Usenet newsgroups in popularity, there are still thousands of people who posts to newsgroup regularly.  In addition, the archive of Usenet newsgroups, originally started by a company called Deja News and now owned by Google under the Google Groups name, is especially helpful when searching for information about a topic that might be a few years old, such as a question about a network card running under Windows 98.

There are web sites, such as Google Answers and Yahoo! Answers (notice that they don’t name their services Google Questions or Yahoo! Questions) , that bring together people who have questions to ask with people that like answering other people’s questions.  With Google Answers, Google has pre-screened a limited number of researchers.  Customers with questions pay a small non-refundable listing fee to post the question and offer a price for an answer.  Question askers don’t pay unless they’re satisfied with the answer.  Yahoo! Answers has a similar structure, except that no money changes hands.  Instead, Yahoo! offers a points system, with additional privileges available for users once they reach a certain point tier.  While it costs points to post a question, you earn points for choosing a best answer for your question, answering questions or having your answer selected as the best answer.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (Mturk) is an interesting twist on the concept of harnessing the power of crowds.  Instead of a simple question-and-answer structure that Google Answers and Yahoo! Answers uses, Mturk leverages the power of the human brain and its ability to handle certain tasks, such as identifying objects in a picture, much more efficiently and accurately than any machine or computer can.  Instead of question askers and question answerers, Mturk has requesters and people who complete tasks.  What’s the incentive for people to complete tasks?  You guessed it… money, usually very small amounts though.  When the Mturk service was introduced a few years ago, the only requesters were other groups within Amazon.  Now, they are dozens of requesters that post very interesting and different tasks.  I’ve seen requests as varied as selecting the best picture that represents a specific business to writing trivia questions on current events to transcribing podcasts.  While Mturk hasn’t taken off in the same way that Google Answers or Yahoo! Answers has, I think we’ll see many more similar services in the future.

So, there are numerous places that John could have turned to for an answer to his question about Excel.  In the future, there won’t be a need for traditional printed or electronic documentation.  Instead, software vendors will simply provide a user interface on top of one (or more) of these existing ways of leveraging the knowledge of large numbers and provide low-cost, accurate, on-demand help 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

In the end, John (not his real name) received several replies to his question and sent back a note to the list thanking the numerous people who replied and stating that he did get his question answered.  For once, a story with a happy ending

This entry was posted on Friday, October 13th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under IT, New and Noteworthy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.