We was told that a Floxter blog was long overdue – and we agree. So, here it is… we carved out some time from our schedules and will make it a habit to keep the blogger world uptodate on what is happening at Floxter.
What’s Floxter? Well, it is an effort to harness the power of crowds to tackle problems which humans can solve but are not easily solvable by computers. We see the success of this concept in various applications like Flickr image tagging, Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, the Open Directory Project and many more. For more inspiration on the topic, I recommend you read Wisdom of the Crowds by James Surowiecki, if you haven’t already.
Most existing efforts use specialised, custom “crowdsourcing” functions, tailored to solve the need of a specific application. Floxter is a general platform. You can request virtually any type of feedback from humans. Just post a task, define an appropriate reward and someone out there will solve the task for you.
There are various challenges such a general platform needs to address and Floxter has addressed the major ones already. However, it would be bold to claim we’ve solved all of them – we’re getting there though! We will discuss the one or other challenges and how we solve them in this blog at some point. In the meantime, try it out yourself!
