SnapMyLifeâs Genius Use of ⦠Humans

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/T7sCTD7H-p4/

This post is part of Mashable's Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: SnapMyLife

Quick Pitch: SnapMyLife is a mobile-web community for instantly saving, sharing, and discovering photos around the world with location tagging and maps.

Genius Idea: SnapMyLife offers a familiar method for getting your camera phone pictures onto the Web. After signing up, you get a unique email address. When you send photos to it, that photo becomes part of your gallery and is broadcast to your SnapMyLife friends in a Twitter-like timeline.

What makes SnapMyLife unique is what happens in between. When you send your photos to your unique email address, they are routed through Amazon's Mechanical Turk. From there, Mechanical Turk workers assign tags to your photos.

While you could do this on your own on the site, given SnapMyLife is based mostly on camera phone uploads, having human intelligence do the tagging makes a lot of sense from a usability standpoint, and in terms of getting more tagged content on the site. The result is some great, incredibly accurate tagged photos with beautiful pictures from around the world.

Mechanical Turk isn't free – but in this case, it seems the value that SnapMyLife is getting in terms of content and community makes the expense well worth it.

---

Sponsored by BizSpark: Featured BizSpark Startup

Lokad ( Company Profile )
Lokad is an online time-series forecasts provider, with clients in the retail and the utilities areas.