Motivating Users - Peekaboom and the ESP Game

Credit:

Web 2.0 is all about the wisdom of crowds and user-generated content. So how do you motivate your users to contribute? You could create a great community feel, like Flickr - or perhaps you could pay them, ala Squidoo and Mechanical Turk. How about creating a selfish reason to contribute, like storing your bookmarks on del.icio.us? Better still, why not turn the whole process into a game?

That last idea is one that doesn't get much love from the 2.0 crowd, but it could be huge if done correctly. The thought leader in this space is Luis von Ahn - one of the creators of captchas (he was also involved with Amazon's MTurk). More importantly, Luis has built a pair of online games that could dramatically improve image search. I took a brief look at Peekaboom last year, but it's high time we revisited the concept.

Credit:

So is this a model that could work elsewhere? How about language translation, podcast transcriptions, video annotation or web search in general? This would not only be cheaper than revenue sharing - it would also keep the spammers at bay. (Sidenote: revenue sharing works best where transactions are involved - social shopping, stock photos, advertising etc). The question is: how often do you have to update the games to keep them fresh and exciting?

[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]