Tapping the wisdom of the crowds

I recently had a conversation with a friend who remarked: “You’re so lucky that you work over the web. Not only do you get to set your own hours, but you can also ask other people on the web to do some of your work for you because they’re nice and have nothing better to do.”

Sure, I was a little taken aback by his comment, but I understood his sentiment. What he was essentially referring to was the lazyweb, which is the idea where “if you wait long enough, someone will write/build/design what you were thinking about.” What most people have been appending to that definition these days, however, is the ability to not only wait for things to be done, but to specifically ask for them to be done as well.

A few examples: I’ve mentioned a few times that the “return to inbox” button on the Facebook message interface was much too close to the “send” button, and this was resulting in a few frustrating instances where I would lose my replies because I would click in haste. After one too many of these frustrations, I sent a quick tweet over on Twitter asking for some help. Within minutes, my friend Gabriel Mansour had replied with a link to a quick GM script he had written to help me out. A perfect example of “ask the lazyweb, and you shall receive.”

A few weeks ago, I was lamenting the fact that my email overload was making me go a little crazy. Essentially, I was looking for a system where I could motivate myself to reply to the several hundred emails that swarm my inbox everyday without burning myself out, and I know I wasn’t the only one. The power of the lazyweb then came through when Mike Davidson and friends created sentenc.es, a method for dealing with email overload in a simple and lo-fi way. I could relate to Mike’s thoughts on email when he said:

When faced with an inbox of 100-400 messages, I usually find myself replying to the messages which are quickest to reply to, rather than which are most important to reply to. The end result is a continual paring down of my inbox until I have 50 really important messages to reply to which are then too old to take care of.

Sentenc.es responds to the web’s cry for a way to handle email overload. From now on, you’ll be getting five sentence email replies, thanks to five.sentenc.es and the lazyweb.

There are tons of other examples using Pownce, Facebook, and other tools around the internet that have proven essential to the power of the lazyweb. Web Worker Daily has a great post dealing with the issue of using the lazyweb for your work, but remember that sharing information and resources on the web isn’t just for people that use the internet for their career: it’s for anyone that needs some help and is welling to help someone else in return.