Google just launched prizes.org | Hacker News Reader

Google just launched prizes.org

prizes.org

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Screenshot when logged in: https://img.skitch.com/20110704-j2fdjyed367jcehytnqfp5mea4.p...

Initial thoughts and observations:

1. It's 'Stack Overflow for the common (wo)man' with cash instead of reputation.

2. Alternative pitch: "99designs meets Yahoo Answers."

3. The top prize available at the moment awards $50.

4. The sign-up process could be a lot better. Prompting sign-up via twitter/Facebook, then prompting for a prizes.org-only username and password is an unusual approach.

5. 'Contest' creation is currently by invitation only.

6. Answers you give that are accepted become the IP of the person who awarded the prize. (http://prizes.org/faq )

7. I'm not yet convinced that there's a huge market for paid responses when the Stack Exchange network and Quora both offer large userbases who give their time to answer questions for free.

> 7. I'm not yet convinced that there's a huge market for paid responses when the Stack Exchange network and Quora both offer large userbases who give their time to answer questions for free.

Perhaps it is this model they are trying to defeat. If an answerer has the opportunity to earn real money for their time, it might be theorized that they would opt for that over the karma systems. It makes sense for a greater breadth of expertise, as respect loses its inherent value as you grow beyond the social circles or occupational circles.

There's also the risk that small amounts of money make it less likely for experts to offer their opinion. When I'm selling my time for $250+/hour, I'm not going to put any time into a contest with a $50 (or even $250) prize; but I'm more than happy to share it for free in the right community (like HN).

This is the same offline. I'll gladly give up an afternoon to help friends and family with their micro businesses, but when they offer to pay it becomes awkward - they can't afford what I charge (since my business model and pricing is designed for much larger clients), and I have no energy to sell myself cheaply. Just say thank you / buy me a six pack / click the little up arrow.

Why everyone thinking about professional use cases? They did not use the term contest for nothing. For things like picking a name this could be great.

This will be interesting to watch as an experiment in intrinsic vs extrinsic motivations. Personally, I think this will become a Mechanical Turk style wasteland full of people charging < $1/hr and churning out dross.

Wasn't there an article a few months ago on HN about people completely changing their behavior when rewarded for the same task with money vs praise?

i had to google 'dross'

That is not something to boast about.

perhaps, he thought he was complimenting you..:-)

Didn't they try a similar theory with Knol vs. Wikipedia?

so it is much like google answers?

http://answers.google.com/answers/

(( imho :: google answers was a project that could have been stack exchange // 99 designs, but google never pushed it where it could have gotten to ))

You don't need to log in: http://prizes.org/home

re: 4, that is because of the namespace collision between fb and tw. ie. if I signin with my fb username and then somebody signs in with a tw account with the same username

But why not just use OAuth/Facebook Connect to both sign up and log in to the service (where username collision makes no difference)? Why require a username and password in addition?

It's really in case Facebook "screws them" -- in that scenario, nobody is tied to the Facebook login and can still access the site. Allowing them to Facebook Connect now lets them at least take advantage of viral "things" -- e.g. a wall post is posted when you sign up.

It's not just for collision prevention. It's so that prizes users have their own login, should fb/twitter OAuth be down.

actually, I did not have to provide a username. I signed in with twitter using my email address. Perhaps the additional username was only required for Facebook connections? Between the two, Twitter is the only one with a true username identification.

I assume it will prompt you if there is a username collision. that is what I did when I recently implemented it. I wouldn't even show that step and assume that primary username is tw or fb username unless there was a collision

there was a security hole on a site not long ago that would let you login to another account if you had the same username on one of the other logins. can't remember which site

This seems fairly exploitable.

I post a question, and wait for answers. I create another account and answer it. I pick my own answer as the best answer, and I lose no money. I gain the information that others gave me for free.

You could say the same thing about Adsense. Stick some adverts on your website and make money by clicking on them.

Google's the worlds leading expert in click-fraud, I'm sure they can figure out if you're doing this.

This. When it comes to money, people will exploit it as much as possible.

From their FAQ: "Do I have to pick the winner of my contest? If your contest receives less than 5 entries by the time it ends, you're not obligated to pick a winner. You have the option to extend the contest for seven (7) days for free. 'Extend Contest' and 'Contact us' link information is available on the contest page.

So, what if I just forget to log back in and award people the prize? Does google automatically pick a winner?

Yes, google will automatically pick a winner, as explained here in the faq (http://prizes.org/faq)

How does Voting work? You may vote on as many contests as you wish. However, you can only vote for one entry in a given contest each day, and you may not vote for yourself. You do have the option to vote for more entries in the same contest tomorrow! If buyers don't pick a winner when the contest ends, winners will be chosen by popular vote.

Elsewhere in the faq, it says that if you don't choose a winner, the winner will be automatically chosen as the answer with the most votes.

Maybe they tolerate that behaviour as long as not everyone is doing it. There's probably some automatic way of detecting people cheating the system and suspending the accounts automatically.

I'm mostly concerned about the opposite. I can see an answer having 200 replies and none of them being more deep than an online search.

All the time.

It will be like yahoo answers with money. train wreak waiting to happen.

I assure you the best answers I gave/got at stack overflow and some other content specific forum was not because I/they needed $5 to help somebody else.

While some of the DNS data points at Google, it's primary DNS server shares the IP address with a DNS server for slide.com.

The IP address for that DNS server is part of a block that is allocated to Slide, Inc. at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA which also happens to be the address of Google HQ.

Which makes sense, given http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/google-buys-slide-for-182-m....

But no, I wouldn't have thought it was a Google property either.

Edit: fix URLs, oops.

Indeed, the terms of service indicates: "Prizes.org is offered by Slide (part of Google Inc., located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA, USA)."

Ah, indeed.

I think more than anything this illustrates the state of my brain after staring at code for well too long--the first thing that occurred to me was that this was spam or some sort of colossal conspiracy.

Alright then, time for bed.

Slide seems to be operating as an independent operation just funded by Google at this point (I mean, their other app is a group texting service that debuted on iOS and has absolutely zero integration with Google services/Google's other group texting service that just was released). While that is a interesting strategy, it really makes Google appear scattershot. Especially since Slide's products all reek of buzzwords and are almost stereotypically Silicon Valley startup products. If this is the plan, why didn't Google just invest heavily in Slide instead of acquiring them? Because right now Slide's main recent success has been creating awkward headlines for Google.

That's from Google? Nah. Anybody had a look at the end of the source, they used a copy-paste code for the Analytics but forgot to actually put in their own GA number.

>> var _gaq = [['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X'], ['_trackPageview']];

"Prizes.org is offered by Slide (part of Google Inc., located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA, USA)."

Thanks, good info.

And even more funny that they messed up including the GA code and tried to use some "async hack" to paste it.

It's probably from the HTML5 Boilerplate: http://html5boilerplate.com

This is a Google offering that only allows Facebook and Twitter sign-in. That's a bit odd; perhaps it exists for the purpose of getting people to opt their Facebook/Twitter info over to Google?

More evidence for this theory: here's what Prizes asks for via Facebook Connect:

…name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information I've shared with everyone… Prizes may access my data when I'm not using the application.

The requester dialog only identifies as 'Prizes', not as Google, which seems a bit shifty. The Prizes 'Privacy Policy' says...

We'll treat any such information [from the Social Network Service] under this policy as if you'd given it directly to us.

It also links to the main Google privacy policy, which says (in far more words) that Google can use any info you give them to improve any of their services.

About a month ago, Google started showing me info here and there referring to people I follow on Twitter. I didn't understand at the time and still don't know how they matched up my Google account to my Twitter account.

The Facebook request details you're quoting are not unusual.

> I didn't understand at the time and still don't know how they matched up my Google account to my Twitter account

The information on http://www.google.com/s2/u/0/search/social can be informative for checking how Google links you with other people. Even if you didn't share your Twitter username with Google, I suppose that if someone on your contacts list shared their Twitter username, Google would be able to make the connection.

At one point, I'm pretty sure Google asked me if my Twitter account was me. That is, they inferred it, based on some number of available signals.

Me to... I think it was pushed out to me in personalized search when an item I was searching for was recommended by my twitter handle.

Is your Twitter linked from your Google profile?

I didn't even have a Google profile until three days ago. I hadn't entered my full name, had not used the gmail to sign up for anything, have only exchanged 2 emails.

What would Google gain from such practices? Why not just ask you your facebook/twitter username upfront? Propally only a small percentage of their user base is ever going to use prices.org anyway. I think the story here is that it is done by slide, which still acts like it's an independent company.

What would Google gain? More opt-ins. Maybe more people are willing to opt their friends-list into a service called 'Prizes' with no Google branding than Google itself. Or even if not more people, a different set of people, who incrementally add info that would be harder to get otherwise.

The idea this is Slide showing its independence is interesting too, but why no Google/Google+ as even an option?

I think one of the potential problems with Google+ is that it is a "brand extension", too close to the parent brand, which already means something else to people. (To some extent, this was the problem with "Google Video" versus "YouTube", as well.) Maybe Google has empowered Slide to move full-speed ahead on a "Plan B", a network of many social sites unencumbered by Google branding. At the extreme, if all else fails, this could culminate in a new social network service by Google but under a non-Google name.

It might be every bit as simple as Google+ not having the right APIs yet.

I used traceroute to check where prizes.org is hosted. It runs on slide.com, which belongs to Google.

The TOS also state the following: "Prizes.org is offered by Slide (part of Google Inc., located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA, USA)"

http://prizes.org/tos

Is there even the wildest possibility that the entire emphasis of using Fb and Twitter as primary sign up options was intentional especially to get social graphs which might not be easily possible directly via G+?

I know it sounds far fetched, but we are talking about the gateway to the world of social graph that Facebook is highly unlikely to share especially if it was under the direct banner of Google.

It feels to me that it's more of trying to show independence of Slide team from Google.

Looks pretty legit to me.

     WHOIS information for prizes.org :
     [Querying whois.publicinterestregistry.net]

     [whois.publicinterestregistry.net]

     Domain ID:D104066777-LROR
     Domain Name:PRIZES.ORG
     Created On:07-Mar-2004 19:34:50 UTC
     Last Updated On:18-May-2011 17:43:19 UTC
     Expiration Date:07-Mar-2015 19:34:50 UTC
     Sponsoring Registrar:MarkMonitor Inc. (R37-LROR)
     Status:CLIENT DELETE PROHIBITED
     Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
     Status:CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED
     Status:TRANSFER PROHIBITED
     Registrant ID:mmr-87489
     Registrant Name:DNS Admin
     Registrant Organization:Google Inc.
     Registrant Street1:1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
     Registrant City:Mountain View
     Registrant State/Province:CA
     Registrant Postal Code:94043
     Registrant Country:US
     Registrant Phone:+1.6502530000
     Registrant Phone Ext.:
     Registrant FAX:+1.6502530001
     Registrant FAX Ext.:
     Registrant Email:dns-admin@google.com

Sigh, I don't want to sign up via Facebook, and I don't want to sign up via Twitter. Goodbye otherwise interesting service.

You could always create a second, unused Twitter account for signups to services that don't need Twitter tweet access otherwise.

I have my main account, and then a second one to sign up for these types of websites, services that want to auth with Twitter that might send tweets I don't want (and then I sign up again with my main account if it checks out just fine), contests, and similar. I'm not against Twitter login or contest use, as I can see that being helpful to lots of people as basically a much more accessible OpenID-like single signon experience. I just don't want to spam my followers nor do I want to associate my main Twitter account with that :)

And after you connect with your FB or Twitter, it asks you again for an email/password combo.

... and I am still waiting for a confirmation email, without it I can't sign in.

cough Google you own your own single sign on technology cough

But if you sign in with your Google account, how will Prizes (and by extension, every other Google service) get your list of Facebook friends?

If G+ wants my list of Facebook friends, all they have to do is ask. I'll gladly hand it over.

Not everybody is you.

I think google just completed an ownership transition of this domain, and the old site remain on the air

http://who.is/domain_archive-org/prizes.org/

http://web.archive.org/web/20071217101136/http://prizes.org/

Am really not sure why this app needs offline access to my data. I've developed Facebook apps myself and it is generally important to clearly specify why an app needs offline access unless the reason is obvious (say an iphone client where logging in each time might be a pain).

Is the rationale behind this prize / contestant format to make it easy to avoid tax obligation?

I'm just wondering why they set it up this way rather than stating it as a freelancer format.

I would have never known this was a Google property.

Surely the facebook single sign on option will not continue, that is, unless slide is some sort of joint venture with outside forces?

Is this really a google property? It tweets for you, follows its twitter account without telling you, and spams you as well.

While I don't condone the actions, the part where you say "without telling you" is unfounded. I just went through the sign-up and there are clearly two checkboxes, which are checked by default: [x] "Share on Twitter [x] Follow @Prizes"

It's by Max Levchin's company Slide, which was acquired by Google last year. They have many apps that are popular on Facebook and were popular on MySpace.

Google does in fact own the domain...

http://www.dotweekly.com/google-obtains-prizes-org-domain-na...

I signed up, and submitted an answer to a "contest"... it's pretty active, so I've now received like 30 emails spamming the hell out of my mailbox every time someone else submits an answer.

After the first 10 I disabled everything that seemed like it would cause these emails, but no change.

This sucks, please fix.

Somewhat off topic, but I can't get past how similar the Prizes logo looks to the Picplz logo.

Load http://prizes.org/ and http://picplz.com in tabs next to each other and compare their favicons.

The best part is how the main way to sign in is with facebook connect.

Deleted comment

>Prizes.org is offered by Slide (part of Google Inc., located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA, USA).

I really doubt that this is Google property. If it was, the first thing to expect would be to sign up/in with my Google account.

Slide made it, Google owns slide. Slide launched it, Google didn't.

Techcrunch is just using that as a headline to bring trafic.

https://www.starmind.com for the masses?

Interesting that you login with Facebook connect and Twitter, but no google login.

Agreed, why do you think this is?

If it requires you to log in with Facebook, that's a red flag right there.

weird that they are using a .org domain for a commercial service

I have something personal against spec work, and this site seems to be all about it. It's sad that this kind of behavior is becoming more standard. But, what can one do if not educate future professionals not to take it.

There is no way to filter or browse by category, useless.

I want something like this for programmers.

Code my Startup - $5000 ;)

Google didn't launch prizes.org; Slide did.

Which is a division of Google.

loading animation is annoying

spec work is evil. avoid!

Ummm, Google launched this? Says who?

How do I know this is google????? Anyone?

I dont believe this is from Google. Dishonest marketing from the real owner to post on HN that it is by Google...

This puts me in an interesting position... I launched this exact same product a few months ago with http://www.code4cheap.com/ (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2506706).

What should I do?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com