crowdlog

A fun experiment Emily and I ran this week had a simple question: what kind of interesting, unique, or surprising stories could we gather on Mechanical Turk regarding use/mis-use/re-use of popular sites like Google and Facebook? We were inspired by Eric von Hippel and Don Norman’s recent articles (von Hippel; Norman) on end- and lead-user innovation. Their claim is that inspiration for design and innovation can come from observing and collecting the ways your users are adapting products for use in their own lives.

We paid 1¢ each to participants. At first, we asked them:

What’s a strange, funny, or weird way in which you’ve used Google, Wikipedia, eBay, or Facebook?

Our first 100 answers back were of limited success; here’s what we found:

1. Too many people repeating obvious uses — “I use it to search for things” for Google, “I buy things on it” for eBay
2. Not enough stories, mostly one-liners
3. A few nuggets within the pile
4. eBay answers were almost worthless; there wasn’t much variety in what you could do on eBay — the platform is a well-scoped service

We revised our prompt and design and also increased the size of the response text box, to encourage longer answers. Our new prompt was:

Please tell us a story about how you used Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, or Twitter in a surprising way in which most other people don’t

We varied the wording a bit, but this was the gist of our prompt. Our responses this time were far better; paragraphs rather than one-liners, stories with depth and surprise. We collected 229 responses ($2.29 plus commission to Amazon), about 150 of which made it in to the final list (after we got rid of offensive, incoherent, and non-interesting answers). We grouped and visualized the ideas by site; here are the thumbnails, click for full size (about ~1MB-1.5MB each):

Google



Wikipedia



Facebook



Twitter (only 11 responses)

Also check out the 164kb PDF with all four together.

Some of the most interesting responses

On Facebook or other Social Network:

It was actually through Facebook that I found a sister that I never knew. My parents had given her up for adoption when she was born because they were not yet married and no means of caring for her. I searched and searched for her, but it wasn’t until I discovered Facebook that I discovered her:)

I have had a renewed communication with my daughter using Facebook. She is 26 and i am 50, so this is really wonderful! Every couple days, we chat through Facebook, and we can see significant details of each other’s lives. This is very helpful, since we live 2000 miles apart.

I’m a young faculty member at a university. I use facebook to keep up with my friends and colleagues — and to get important information out to my classes! When there is an announcement that people need to see quickly, I’ll write a facebook note and tag all of the members of the class concerned. That way, everyone who needs to know gets notified as soon as they check facebook — usually much faster than email!!

I made a fake myspace page and pretended to be someone else so I can spy on my boyfriend and to see if my boyfriend would flirt with my fake identity

On Google:

We use this service to follow our daughter’s sports in local newpapers and then can forward the info directly on to colleges that are interested in recruiting her for their sports teams

I google my name and the serp is empty; it is very humbling.

When enteing names in the Google seach engine My children and I entered my husbands name after already entering several others and receiving nothing interesting. Upon entering the name several entries were received back with the name. Upon investigating these entries we discovered my sister inlaws mom. My husband had never met this sister and it seems that she was looking for his dad who had disappeared some time ago. Upon further investigation of these hits we discovered some medical problems that ran in the family that explained fully some odd behaviors my husband had been having that could also effect our children. Without the google seach engine This info would never have been found.

I googled my mother. I was 31 years old when I found my Mom through a service I found on Google. I’ve still not met her in person, but I’ve spoken to her several times on the phone. She has two other children but even though I wasn’t raised arond her I am the one who is the most like her.

I had tried numerous times over the years to find my best friend from primary school but she was not listed on Friends Reunited and none of our classmates knew what had happened to her after university either. She was from Sri Lanka with a long surname that I could not remember in its entirety. One day I decided to Google just her first name, even though I felt that there were probably hundreds of Sri Lanks called “Pireeni”. Miraculously, I hit on her immediately. She is now a well know poet in San Francisco, we have remade contact, are in touch regularly and I hope to go to San Francisco to meet up with her in the future.

I have used Google to determine whether one of my college students’ papers is partly or wholly plagiarized. We don’t use turnitin at my campus, so I must rely on Google. It’s amazing that students don’t realize that I have access to the very same Internet that they do! They copy and paste entire pages or articles into their papers and then pretend that they wrote them on their own. And this is AFTER I have told them not to do this because they cannot outsmart me!

Years ago I used google as a sort of divination thing. I needed something to do cause I was bored so I typed in “Jessica likes to” and it gave me results for things I could possibly do. I read Jessica likes to dance, so I ended up going dancing that night.

On Wikipedia:

I was in the Navy and the computers on the ship would allow .org sites to be visited anytime, while .com sites were limited to save bandwidth. I learned ALOT in those 6 months surfing wikipedia and it is still one of my favorite sites to use.

Yes. I bet a friend that there was a permanent space station docked on the moon. I thenk changed the wikipedia article and added the false statement about a space station being docked on the moon. i then showed him the article and he believed me.

Wikipedia is how we resolve pretty much any dispute we have at the bar, using mobile internet.

One day i spent 4 hours on Wikipedia trying to see if someone/anyone in any article had mentioned my name. I checked my school, community, city, hometown and just about anything and everything associated with me. Bad luck.

I like to play a game I call ‘6 degrees of Wikipedia’. I click on the random article button, and decide some topic I want to find from this starting point. For example: Mr. T, or Trigonometry, or Star Wars. From the random article I try to click through the links towards my goal in as few clicks as possible. It’s a fun and challenging game that kills time and can have surprising results. It’s interesting (to me, anyhow) how things link together!

I have used Wikipedia to ask questions that I would normally not ask family or friends. Sometimes it is something that I probably should have known already by my age. People are usually nice on Wikipedia and I can remain anonymous.

Finally, on twitter:

I found out my sister-in-law was using Twitter. I was curious what she was writing about and although she mentioned just about every minor detail of her boring life on the site, she made no mention whatsoever of attending an evening recently with my husband and I. I figured we were low on her list, but there’s the proof.

I live-blogged via Twitter during the birth of my son! It gave family and friends moment-by-moment updates at the labor and delivery without having to deal with multiple telephone calls.

letting my friends know when a inpromptu concert happened. People were there in 15 minutes.

Several of our friends who live far away use Twitter, and my partner and I tweeted our wedding vows to one another so our friends who were unable to attend could still share our experience virtually.

Overall, there was a remarkable breadth and depth in responses; I’m unaware of any other needfinding/data-collection method where you could get such a diversity of thought for less than $3. Of course, there are trade-offs: the stories may be made up; it is much harder to follow up with each person; the stories often lack context and the demographic information needed to group and tally these needs; and finally, self-report will miss other surprising behaviors from participants that would require a trained observer to verify. But we found the results encouraging and are looking forward to following up with more.