9 Free and Great Crowd Sourced Applications

Posted on 23. Feb, 2010 by Squealing.Rat in Internet Tools

iPhone Applications

Waze

I recently discovered Waze and loved it. Basically, Waze is a free iPhone application that aims to deliver free turn by turn directions. When you are out on a drive, simply launch the application and leave it running. The application uses your GPS to map road directions and other information. If you run into traffic, you can enter that into the application, and it will use that information to prevent others from being stuck in that jam. Can’t visualize it? Watch the Waze guided tour here.

GasBag

GasBag is an application that I have been using for a while. I was drawn to it for the simple reason of price. The application is free (other apps do the same thing for $5). GasBag allows you to record gas station prices and log your gas purchases. I love this application because at a moments notice, when the gas tank is low, I can look up the cheapest gas in the area. Every time you get gas, make sure to enter in the gas prices of the station for the benefit of you and others.

Web Applications

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a website that is known far and wide as a source of information. Boasting a community that knows nearly everything, Wikipedia is a website of collective knowledge that spans over 14 million articles. Submit your knowledge and receive the satisfaction of knowing you are helping educate the public.

Amazon Reviews

Amazon is one of the largest online stores on the internet. But the truly amazing thing about Amazon is not the products, the prices or even the storage. It is the unbelievably vast collection of reviews that talk about products and allow customers to make the best choice when purchasing something. After you purchase something on Amazon, take a minute to give your opinion of it so that others know what to buy and don’t waste their money.

ReCaptcha

ReCaptcha is the stone that kills two birds at the same time. ReCaptcha prevents robots from spamming systems and helps convert scanned books to text. Surely you have tried to sign up for an account at some point and had to type in characters in an image. The focus of that annoying step is to prevent robots from spamming a site by creating an image only a human can identify. ReCaptcha uses words from attempted books scans that the computer couldn’t convert as words to use for the captcha. So every time you fill in one of the somewhat annoying forms, know that you are helping books get converted.

Google Image Labeler

The Google Image Labeler is a tool that benefits search, not just for Google, but for everyone that likes the ability to find what they are looking for fast. In what Google calls a game, you observe images with a cyber-buddy, tagging them in hopes that what both parties tagged will be the same. For every tag that both get, your points add up. This addicting “service” helps Google with their image search and you to get a high score.

Aardvark

Aardvark, written about previously, is a service that helps you find the answers to your questions. A different take on the normal question and answer service, Aardvark uses IM to allow you to chat with your answerers. The service also attempts to get answers to you from reliable people, send questions to others that have tagged their profile to answer those types of questions. Crowd sourcing comes easy here, because the more you participate, the more you benefit the larger community. (Psst! Check out the full review of Aardvark here.)

Panoramio

Here’s a little known fact: Google Street View is not just comprised of images from the Google Street View mobile. In fact, Google shows other images as well (just check the box under more that says images). Those images, for the most part, are from Google’s little known Panoramio, a service that accepts user generated photos that included location information. Google integrated those photos with Google Maps for a truly crowd sourced photo walk.

Computer Applications

Folding@Home

Folding@Home is a application you can download that takes full advantage of crowd sourcing. Folding@Home creates a network of computers that come together to form a super computer that is used to solve complex problems and try and use knowledge of the computers to help science and knowledge. When you download the application, you agree to donate your computer’s free CPUs to the program, so that when you are not using your computer, it can use it. But Folding@home is not the only application out there of its kind. Here are several others:SETI@home, Rosetta@home, Einstein@Home, and Astropulse.

Others

*Flickr has started a cool game to encourage people to tag photos with locations here.

*Yahoo Answers, similar to Aardvark is still a popular question and answer service. For more answer services, check out this 2.0 Life article here.

*Have knowledge of other languages? Try out a crowd sourced translation service like Translated.by.

*Heck, an article about crowd sourcing can include crowd sourced material, right? Well then check out this Wikipedia page on crowd sourcing for other applications.

What crowd sourced applications do you use? Let us know in the comments!

The writer of this post compiles the latest tech news and more at Squealing Rat, and writes about tricks and tips of deception, trickery and survival at Lone Iguana. Find him on Twitter.

Photo: victoriapeckham

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One Response to “9 Free and Great Crowd Sourced Applications”

9 Free and Great Crowd Sourced Applications [Lost in Technology] | Squealing Rat: The Word

24. Feb, 2010

[...] [Lost in Technology] Another day, another post at Lost in Technology, this time featuring 9 Free and Great Crowd Sourced Applications. Share and [...]

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