Craigslist 2.0: task outsourcing to local crowd labor

In the time, reputation, and fun hungry modern world, new tools like task outsourcing are emerging to provide these qualities, offering better ways for the invisible hand to meet in your meatsphere neighborhood.

The concept is that the crowdsourcing workplace meets Craig’s list in a local listing service with a reputation economy and badging/leveling up.

At least two startups offer task outsourcing services, TaskRabbit, which has accepted 1,000 reputation-garnering runners into their network to run tasks on demand, and Zaarly, where a consumer names their price for anything and obtains it from people nearby.

It will be interesting to see if there will be crossover in task outsourcing between physical-world tasks and online tasks, whether tools like TaskRabbit and Zaarly could become a 2.0 version of outsourced labor communities like elance, odesk, and 99designs.