15 Cool Web Services Made Up Of The People aka CrowdSourcing

Web 2.0 has changed the way we use the Internet and the most important aspect of this change has been participation of people in building the services that we use on the Internet.  Today, an Internet user plays an important role in building the content on the Internet as well powering certain other web services with his or her participation.  Here is a list, in no particular order, of some of the great services which are made up “Of the People, For the People, By the People.”

Cofundos:

It allows the community of non-programmers who are in need of a software to fund open source software projects.

Cofundos helps to realize open-source software ideas, by providing a platform for their discussion & enrichment and by establishing a process for organizing the contributions and interests of different stakeholders in the idea.

Get Satisfaction:

Get Satisfaction helps companies to let their customers help other customers by providing them with a platform where they can ask questions and report and discuss problems with others.

Get Satisfaction is a place where people can get the most from the products they use, and where companies are encouraged to get real with their customers.

SellaBand:

SellaBand lets the music lovers help bands collect $50,000 to fund their next high quality recording by putting in $10 for one share.  After the music is released, the band, SellaBand and the people who funded the recording make money from ad revenues and download fee.

Mob4Hire:

Mob4Hire lets the companies outsource their mobile application testing to the community of users who help testing the application on various handsets and get paid for testing.  Very simple and effective of getting feedback in the very early stages of application development from the end users themselves.

Live Book:

Live Book is a crowdsourced book writing project where community members participate in writing a book and vote for or against the writing by the users.  Obviously, the writings having more “for” votes get included in the book.

LiveBook is a book (to be more precise, two different books) written by the communities of the Facebook and Bebo networks.  Each book has its own hero – a girl, Helen, who recently entered the Facebook network and a fellow Brian, who registered in Bebo.  The books are written entirely by the community – each Facebook or Bebo user is free to propose their versions for the course of events in the life of the corresponding hero.

IdeaScale:

IdeaScale provides a branded platform to the companies which can be used to gather ideas and opinions about products and services from their customers.  It also allows customers to vote for the best ideas and take them to the top.

IdeaScale enables companies to build living/breathing Digg style communities. IdeaScale is based on the simple model of crowdsourcing. It begins with an idea posted to your IdeaScale community by a user. Each idea can be expanded through comments by the community. The ultimate measure of an idea is determined by a voting system. Any idea can be voted to the top or buried back down to the bottom.

99 Designs:

If you are looking for getting some really creative designed made by designers competing with each other, 99 Designs is the right place for you.

Getting something designed at 99designs is easy. We help you run a “design contest”, where thousands of designers compete to create the best possible design to meet your needs. All you need is a clear idea of what you want designed and how much you’re prepared to pay for it.

Socrato:

Socrato is a crowdsourced system for test preparations which provides a platform to students to collaborate and study in groups for tests like SAT.  The community of users publishes and shares the test material which can be downloaded by others.  Socrato also allows users to take sample tests and analyze their results.

FixYa:

FixYa is a community powered technical support site which provides solutions for day-to-day problems with products and devices.

Fixya provides Free tech support and technical help for gadgets, electronic equipment and consumer products. Fixya’s technical experts advise on fixing problems and provide instructions on proper usage of products either by chat or message posting. Fixya stores manuals and troubleshooting guides for over half a million products.

BigCarrot:

It is a site for people to create, fund and approve inducement prizes for achieving common objectives.

An inducement prize is a cash reward offered to the general public to encourage the pursuit of a specific goal.  BigCarrot allows people with a common interest to come together and pool their contributions to create an inducement prize. Anyone can start a prize on any topic—from large social issues to smaller personal pursuits—and anyone with the ability to claim the prize can submit a solution.

uTest:

uTest allows software companies to harness the power of its community of software testers for testing software for bugs and errors.

uTest provides a Global Marketplace for Software Application Testing. We provide software companies with QA testing and usability testing services by a community of professional testers over a robust hosted application testing platform.

TalentSpring:

TalentSpring helps the recruiters by using the community of job seekers to rate the profiles of other job seekers from their professional area.  Job seekers, after registration, are provided with a set of 12 resumes which they have to rate in order to get their profile listed on TalentSpring.  With a combination of filtering and ranking system, TalentSpring serves high quality candidates to recruiters and thus saves time for them which otherwise goes into browsing through hundreds of resumes.

Massify:

Massify brings the idea of crowdsourcing to film industry.  It is a community for every type of person involved in the film making process.  So, it has film makers, actors, and the critics.  Massify allows film makers to create a pitch for their film which is put across the community which then helps the project to evolve from idea stage to completed project.  The power of community decides the film to be produced, directs the creative development and selects actors to act in the film.

CitizenSide:

Paparazzi plus the power of crowd is equal to CitizenSide.  It connects media and news companies with all those ever attentive people, who keep clicking photos and making videos which are newsworthy.  The users can sell their photos and videos to the media companies and earn money for their work.

Teach The People:

It is community built for online education and knowledge sharing where users contribute content related to varied topics from computer to music.

Instead of just messaging with other users like on traditional social networking services, users on Teach The People are creating their own communities for fun, education, innovation; whatever! User can then fill those communities with as much content & media as they desire with Documents, Images, Videos, AUDIO, Blogs, Discussion Boards, Chat Sessions, Broadcasts etc.

Did I miss out on other services?  If you know of more services than those listed above, please let everyone one know.

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Posted by BETA Daily on May 5 2008. Filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry