Jig.com

Meanwhile, Tasty Labs was founded in 2010 by a team that includes ex-Mozillian Nick Nguyen, HousingMaps creator Paul Rademacher, and Joshua Schachter, who was best known for founding of of “web 2.0″‘s finest: the social bookmarking service Delicious. The company had raised $3 million in Series A funding from Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and other unnamed angel investors.

The startup launched its first product Jig.com in 2011, which was described as a “marketplace for needs” — meaning users would post “I need…” and others would respond to help them. The following year, it debuted Human.io, a micro-task service operating in the same general space. This application targeted businesses with small requests – like wanting to know how many people were in line at a store, for example, or getting people to take short surveys on their phone.

Schachter once described Human.io as a way to “build tiny little microapps and distribute them to a mobile client.” He said it was a combination of things the team loved: “Mobile, Mechanical Turk, MapReduce, and Twilio.”

Going forward, Tasty Labs staff will join Walmart’s Product and Mobile teams, Walmart says, in an effort to build out the company’s e-commerce platform.

Walmart Labs is known for snapping up early-stage startups to test new ideas in e-commerce some of which eventually get folded into the company’s e-commerce site and other online operations. In the past, it has acquired startups like Kosmix, OneRiot, Grabble, Small Society and others.

Missing a slick design and some obviously core functionalities, Skills.to is still in its beginning stages, and Schachter is using the iterations of this and Jig in order to learn in public about the “needs” market,”I’m a fan of development in public,” he tells me, “I don’t believe in doing eight months of development and then releasing a product.”

In the same space as companies like Vouch, the initial feel of Skills.to is reminiscent of Tagsona, an internal Yahoo tool used to find people working on similar projects. Schachter tells me that when user feedback is incorporated, the eventual scope will go beyond simple tagging. His eventual goal is not to build something like Klout, which is more about influence, but instead to turn Skills into a place where people can find who is “the best in the world” at a specific task.

While it’s obvious that Skills and Jig are not completely formed initiatives, Schachter’s objective in iterating on these projects is to explore the future of social software, creating products that move beyond “sharing software and witty comments,” and push people towards connection with a purpose.

With Skills specifically Schachter is focusing on catering to the early adopter tech set, and trying out Twitter integration, as Jig was primarily Facebook focused. “I wish we were already on our 37th thing,” he says.

Do you need some help? So, if you ever need something, you can post it on Jig.com. It was started by the same guy who started Delicious (an awesome bookmarking service)… I used it to get a recommendation for my neighbor’s computer which I installed last night.

Although I didn’t ultimately go with the computer that a few people had recommended, it turned out to be a very helpful reponse. The computer that my neighbor ordered is a great desktop replacement and it can even be mounted to the back of a monitor for a great minimal design.. It didn’t take me very long to remove all the bloatware that was included and to install Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Security Essentials, and many other useful programs. (used a great website called ninite.com to save a bunch of time on this)…

So, if you need help and you want to “crowdsource” your work, then post it on jig.com and see what happens. I think you will find it very useful.

We are trying to make a sort of marketplace. Right now we have needs but some day there will be offers and other things.
by Joshua schachter
12/10/2011

The vast majority of stuff on jig isn't on twitter (although of course that vast majority isn't very major.)

There's a few issues with twitter just adding categorization being competition:

a) We want to build a two-sided market (that means offers to be the other side of needs) and a routing layer on top of it
b) people tend to trust social, geographical, and organizational structures for advice.

The routing problem is a hard one. Not sure Twitter will "just" do that.

by Joshua schachter
12/12/2011

Sorry - the other relevant thing here is that Jig seems to do well when the need has no good answer. Instead, you want a variety of opinions. I think this is one of the places that search tends to fall down.

Additionally, people tend to trust answers from people they know. Stories over statistics; if you asked a friend from Minneapolis for a good restaurant, you'd probably just go without much further research (or even likely to discount a bad yelp rating...)

by Joshua schachter
12/12/2011

i would like to buy wine and ship to utah or just ship wine from my home in NYC to Utah. i'm told most wine sellers won't do this. does anyone know of a retailer or shipper that can do this?

Jig's goal: To more efficiently allocate users' attention. Other social Web services focus on popular people and topics, rather than more precise, meaningful and useful connections.

Why is Jig better than asking questions on a social network, or on a dedicated Q&A site?

The idea is that we will try and route attention to your need, and then when it’s done, we take it away. The goal is to efficiently spread out attention.

These sites like Google+ have a problem with the rich getting bigger, where Scoble will post and it always bubbles up to the top. That’s the long tail enforcing the long tail.

We want to get needs in front of the person most likely to resolve them. We’re couching it in the language of a social network, but underneath it’s not an activity stream, because we actually found that doesn’t work well at all.

550 followers, following 186 - Open Needs, Solved Needs, Recent Activity

Things that happen at Foocamp stay at Foocamp, right? But this came in the email and said it was launching this weekend, so...I am going to ask, get ready (after I walk my dogs) but then probably wait until I find out if it's ok to blog about it. Weee! Also, this is a test.

Earlier this month, we noted that Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, together with Nick Nguyen (the former director of add-ons for Mozilla) and Paul Rademacher, the ex-Googler known for creating “the first true Web 2.0 app”, was working on a new stealthy startup called Tasty Labs.

This morning, Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger revealed on his blog that the firm has invested in Tasty Labs together with Andreessen Horowitz and unnamed angel investors. It’s unclear how much Tasty Labs raised, but we’re trying to find out.

Update: an SEC filing shows the amount: $3 million (thanks, Dan Primack).

There are entrepreneurs we love to work with. Joshua Schachter is on that list. When he told us last year he was starting a new company, Tasty Labs, we said "we're in." It wasn't exactly clear what Joshua wanted to build, but we knew it was in the general area of a marketplace for things people need.

Joshua put together a killer team and they started coding stuff up. A product emerged. We've been using it in alpha and beta for a while. It's evolved. And sometime in the past few days, Joshua took the covers off. It is called Jig and it is indeed a marketplace for things people need.

i would like a web service that proofreads my blog posts and corrects them automatically

On Jig, you can both try to find something that you ‘need,’ help someone find something they need, search for needs by keyword, or invite others to help solve a problem or meet a need. For example, you can post a need to the Jig community (i.e. I need a new designer for my website, I need a new logo, etc) and then members can suggest solutions, or invite a friend to help.

You can sign in with both Twitter and Facebook to populate your social graph, create a profile with your personal information and follow people on Jig, similar to Quora. You can also specify your ‘affiliations’ which allows you to connect a group of users who share something in common with you. It’s essentially a group-forming feature within the platform.

Looking through the initial needs being posted by early users there are requests for restaurants suggestions, a guy asking what gift he should buy for his minimalist girlfriend, a request to understand how UFO propulsion works, requests to hire people, and even a request for affordable health insurance.

There also seems to be quite a bit of spam, or at least unhelpful questions and comments, including some harmless but irrelevant banter. Jig will need to provide for a way to rank needs, comments, and authors so that noise is filtered out. This is a problem that Schachter should be able to solve in his sleep, so I’m not worried about that being a barrier to adoption. It will be resolved soon, I’m betting.

I think Merlin Kauffman is one of the most likeable guys in the domain industry. He attends just about all of the tradeshows and events, and I don’t recall ever seeing him without a big grin on his face. Merlin is a young guy, and his company has amassed a portfolio of great generic domain names.

In doing some research, it appears that Merlin Kauffman’s company, True Magic, LLC, owned Jig.com as late as April of 2011. In May, the domain name was acquired by Tasty Labs, although the sale does not seem to have been publicly reported at the time.

In addition to the TechCrunch article, noted venture capitalist Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, one of the companies that funded Tasty Labs, wrote an article on his blog about Jig.com to help introduce the startup. In the comment section, someone asked what the price of the domain name was, and Schacter replied “$85k.”

The real magic of folksonomies--and the reason sites like del.icio.us can create so much value with so little hired labor--is that they require no effort from users beyond their local work of tagging pages for themselves. It just happens that the by-product of that work is a very useful system for organizing information. This distinguishes del.icio.us from other high-profile Web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia and Digg, which people contribute to without reaping any obvious personal benefit.

Schachter thinks the fact that del.icio.us does not rely on the selflessness of its users makes it more robust than it might otherwise be. "Im not a big believer in expecting a large number of people to act in an altruistic fashion," he says. "You want to rely on people to do what they do." The echoes of Adam Smith are unmistakable: del.icio.us is a system that, like a healthy market, turns individual self-interest into collective good.

Del.icio.us now has more than 300,000 registered users, and it generates as much traffic in a single day as it did in its entire first year. But even as tagging has become an industry buzzword that businesses are straining to associate themselves with, Schachter is confronting the fact that the vast majority of people on the Web don't tag at all--and probably have never even heard of tagging. So how does he expand his sites audience? "You have to solve a problem that people actually have," Schachter says. "But it's not always a problem that they know they have, so that's tricky." He remains more focused on the site's value to the individual than on its folksonomic aspects, because to him, helping individuals store and recall information is far more important than classifying the Web. And it may well be individual value that's most likely to keep del.icio.us growing.