Had a great conversation with CrowdFlower. CrowdFlower is all about making casual or crowd labor reliable. There is a whole new economy being built around the crowdsourcing of labor. This new marketplace is initiating an entire economy of spending around work that could not previously be done online – changing the workforce of tomorrow.

Jobs ranging from research and medical transcription to data entry and content moderation can be crowdsourced to the online workforce.

Computers are great for doing a lot of things fast, but certain jobs need people power.

Crowdsourcing labor will vastly change the way people and businesses work over the next decade.

For workers, it will leave zero room for discrimination (companies won’t even know who is doing the task) and create a complete meritocracy: people getting paid strictly based on the quality and speed of their work.

For businesses, the cloud labor force can help them save money and time while still using real people (and with IDC predicting that IT cloud services will reach $42B by 2012, there is a massive movement happening).

Several dating sites use Crowdflower to manage their user-created content (profiles, photos, etc.) Check them out and tell them you heard about them here.

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As you may or may not know, several years ago I started a company called ProfileDoctor. We built a service that enabled live editors to review dating profiles and make suggestions in improvements. While I thoroughly enjoyed building up the company I ended up getting side-tracked by consulting projects in the dating industry and shelved ProfileDoctor.

Fast forward a few years and I’m amazed at how much better profiles are on dating sites these days. There are still millions of badly written profiles, but overall the quality is much better.

Hint to dating sites. A profile evaluation is a great way to market to stale members and get them back on the site. How many year-old profiles are lying dormant in your database? Major dating sites have millions, wouldn’t it be interesting to market to them with someone better than a “we miss you” remarketing email?

A few weeks ago I wrote about posting your profile photos on HotOrNot to find out which ones people like best. Today I came across the PlentyOfFish Profile Review Forum. What a great idea! For all the good-natured grief I give Markus at PlentyOfFish, it’s features like that that impress me the most.

The concept of crowdsourcing profile reviews is a fantastic value for members. A paid profile writing service might get to know you better but throwing up a profile in the PoF forum and receiving feedback from 50+ people in 24 hours seems to make more sense. There will always be a small percentage of serious daters who will pay $30 – $200 to have someone write their profile.

I would love to build text processing system that parses profiles for terms like “little black dress” or “long walks on the beach” and emails offending members to avoid cliches. One that system is built, you can add on all sorts of interesting tools and services. Don’t be so greedy, make it a free service and wrap it in relevant ads. After all, the value of a dating site, at least to members, is the quality of it’s members and their profiles.

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Happy National Singles Week. Did you know that Operation Match, the first example computer matchmaking, took place in 1965?

Behold, a fascinating article in the The New York Times by Ian Ayres about Super Crunchers, which focuses on the matching systems that power eHarmony, PerfectMatch, True and Yahoo! Personals.

This is the best overview of how dating sites match members that I’ve ever read in the MSM (mainstream media). Learn about wisdom of crowds, regression and Myers-Briggs testing. See how dating sites hide the details of their matching systems as closely as the Coke recipe.

Eharmony comes under a fairly strenuous attack towards the end of the piece, which is taken from a book by the same name. Steven Levitt, the co-author of Freakonomics, praises the book, which means I’m buying Super Crunchers right after I hit the publish button.

The article quotes True.com’s chief psychologist James Houran, but James hasn’t worked at True in several years. I noticed several other inconsistencies but thats what happens when you kill trees and put ink on them. I wonder if Super Crunchers has an errata website?

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