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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

Suggested description:

"Human.io lets you to script with humans as easily as you would script with software. It does for the digital economy what the assembly line did for the industrial economy.

The software allows you to dynamically assemble ad hoc armies of virtual workers, who are then assigned to complete tasks in the real world using the sensors and input devices on their phones: GPS, camera, microphone, and so on.

Let's say you want to X. Human.io lets you..."

Still not perfect, but I think it's a little more clear than what you have.

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Going along this, Human.io, "the Human API" enables you to recruit a virtual army's phones, GPS, camera, microphone, etc.

Sample human API tasks: 1. photo scavenger hunt 2. parking garage availability 3. male to female ratio in a club 4. collect blind auction bids

So do you think we should BUILD more examples or just talk about them?

Why not both?

    (V)(°,,°)(V)

I'd start by placing the ones that you do have more prominently on your site. Right now they're below the fold and are the very last thing on the page. However, to me they're far more descriptive of what the product is than a picture showing that you connect a mobile phone to a server. I also want to know why you're different. I can already connect a mobile phone to a server. Why are you better? Also, one thing that confuses the hell out of me is that the picture says "Create and instantly deploy mobile apps" and then later on you have text that says "The end-users (the humans in human.io) use our iOS and Android app". So which is it? Do I create a new app or do they use your app? I think what this may be is mechanical turk for mobile devices. That actually seems pretty cool. In any case, good luck!

Your target user is tech saavy, but this is a platform looking for problems. Describing examples with pictures should be good enough for now. When you have real examples from users, then you can screenshot and link them.

I'm imagining a headline like "Things that used to be really really hard, but are easy with Human.io" and then pictures and captions describing the use cases.

> Human.io lets you to script with humans as easily as you would script with software

That was our thinking when we first started working on human.io. If GMaps lets you invoke methods on a map, and Twilio on a phone, what would it mean to invoke methods on a person?

"That was our thinking when we first started working on human.io."

I think it's important to have that first, otherwise you are burying the lead. Although I can see why you wouldn't want to prematurely niche yourself, I don't think the pitch about engaging your users is especially compelling.

"what would it mean to invoke methods on a person?"

I mean ultimately you want to be selling the benefits and not the features, so I think being able to communicate the implications of that statement are much more important than being able to come up with a snappy analogy for the statement itself.

If you're really committed to staying neutral on usage though, we already have the term HCI for human-computer interaction. So maybe you could describe it as an HCI programming language or something.

FWIW you use whatever language you want on your end. It's more like a HCI RPC or something. With humans on the far end.

This is good stuff. Thank you.

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