Google now lets you create your own Street View maps

This rings so true. Lots of Google's databases are built on user work. Map listings, ingress, Google Voice fuelling Google Now recognition.... come to my mind right now. But it is amazing Google responds to user needs and makes products that lots of people use. So ultimately, it remains connected to the user and makes novel products. Win-Win.

Yellowpages?

I think deep down many of us wants this kind of medium to aggregate our tiny efforts into something big we enjoy. And people respond positively because Google get value out of it as much as we do by contributing.

About your question, I don't know, but I'm curious too. Especially considering the communication technology of that day, it would require some ingenuity to do large scale crowdsourcing.

Microsoft's MVP program started in the early 90s and essentially outsourced customer service in forums to thousands of volunteers. In exchange, they receive an MSDN sub they probably already had, some discounts, and a nifty certificate.

AOL had a similar program that was even bigger: 14k volunteers. A class-action suit in 1999 argued that they were doing the work of employees (w/ a training program, minimum hours, time cards, and work reports) and they should be compensated as such. AOL immediately started cutting back on the program and 11 years later, AOL settled for $15M. [1]

I think any company/org that has crowd-sourced anything is going to tap into the same psyche: people want a sense of being on the "inside," they want to make their mark, and they want the tiniest bit of recognition for their work. Wikipedia has its armies of Wikipedians. Reddit has its Knights of New that voluntarily click on submitted detritus to improve quality. I think Everquest had volunteer game volunteers that served as customer service.

I'm sure there are pre-Internet examples of passionate fans helping companies out, but the web sure did ramp it up.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program

That's what Facebook does with content we post, what Twitter does with content we post (albeit 140 character), etc.. They're not generally doing it out of the good of their hearts. Those kinds of projects don't end up staying alive because they're not profitable - unfortunately, mind you. It would be great if hobby projects, used by even 100 monthly or 1,000,000 monthly, could be kept operational.

Very "clever", right?

What if all those crowd sourced endeavors were obligated to publish / give back to the public the raw data their "users" in this case "workers" provided? Shouldn't "public" work stay "public"?

Would they do it? Would "the community" / the public use it? What would be the concerns besides "the competition could use it" and "this makes our whole biz unprofitable"?

(Something similar to the per-user data-download feature from google, just one level higher; similar to the stackoverflow data dumps maybe?)

Not really a realistic demand, i guess... Just testing the sentiment ;)

/edit:typo

You talk about it as if the users derives no benefit from it at all, when they clearly do.

Most things we do benefit the company involved - buy an iPhone? You just upped Apple's market share, and made it easier for them to negotiate with cellphone providers.

Maybe Apple will have one for their maps soon? Google isn't crapping on anyone. This is brand new and they're not going to be able to support everyone, especially those in an ecosystem they don't control, right off the bat.

ChromeCast worked with my iOS devices immediately on release. Google craps on competitor stuff a lot less than others do.

Apple doesn't exactly provide many great deep-level hooks in it's OS. This is one of the downsides of that.

In all honesty, Apple has never made any effort to provide a level playing field for anyone that isn't Apple on iOS. So I don't blame any company that doesn't bend over backwards to be a part of their ecosystem.

Works for me, Win7 + FF 25.0.1.

Works within an embedded Safari view in Reeder on ios 7