TechNayak

Collaborative apps have been around for quite sometime now, but they have been lurking very close the corporate apps which can be used primarily in a business scenario. A simple example of the same could be the productivity 2.0 apps like Zoho or Google Docs. The only other breed of collaborative app has been games, which is a again a huge draw. Its true that this genre of applications is still finding its foothold on the web and as time progresses you will find killer new applications that will explore new possibilities with colloborative apps.

I had written about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and how it used the power of collaboration combined with automated project management to get arduous work done from people. Taking and extending on the same paradigm are newer applications that try and achieve some good from these collaborative applications. Its like the Seti project which uses your computational resource when idle, these applications use the power of human intelligence to contribute to a greater cause.

Take GalaxyZoo for example.  A project from Oxford, the site aims at using the power of collective human intelligence to aid in pattern recognition. Users are given images of spirals and ellipses to recognise and defragment. The images in essence are images from deep space and the project aims at mapping a virtual universe using GalaxyZoo.

Similarly you have clickWorkers from NASA, a project that aims at identifying craters on Mars. Another useful outcome from these breed of apps is the ability to help in digitizing scanned text or old books. Distributed Proofreaders and ReCaptcha both provide simple to read captchas that form parts of old books that were garbled up by OCR’s while being digitized. Users help in recognizing these garbled , machine unreadable  text in the form of captcha’s and the user input is then given back to the system.

Another interesting collaborative app is the Google Image Labeler. This attempts to solve a problem of tagging images , a usually boring task is made interesting by allowing users to pair up and brainstorm over words that they can come up with for images. Points are given as an added bonus and to keep the game interesting.

There are many other projects that are currently incubating in research labs which are toying with concepts that use this form of collective human intelligence. The challenge will be to streamline these apps into everyday applications and make them more inherent and not be looked at as an overhead. Take for example digg, they ask for captcha auths on submitting a new story. Rather than projects like recaptcha, why not have these captcha’s fit into sites like digg .  That way, the the number of captcha’s served up and translated will be more and will seem more useful to do.