A while back I blogged about Luis von Ahn's Google Tech Talk about the ESP game - an online two player game that has high quality image metadata as a side benefit. During the talk von Ahn muses about the possibilites if this idea got applied on a Google or Yahoo scale. Muse no more, Google licensed the idea. I can't help but wonder if there's going to be both a Safesearch on and a Safesearch off version? I can imagine the audience for the NSFW version could be quite enormous.
On SearchEngineWatch, Danny Sullivan confirms that it's a license not just a loan and immediately thinks industry strategy: Is this Google's way of making Flickr tags irrelevant?
It is pure genious (and also somewhat addictive). People don't seem to agree with my tags though... I get really low scores.
Posted by: Jan Erik on September 6, 2006 12:27 AMIt's absolutely brilliant. The von Ahn lecture is a must see. Clever guy, very lucid.
Considring how badly executed it is in terms of "nice" and "user experience" it's *incredibly* addictive. To think what it good have been with a good UI.