Outsourcing Birthdays and Flirting

http://matznerd.com/outsourcing-birthdays-and-flirting/

by matznerd • 14 years ago

31 27 14 years ago

sp3322• 14 years ago

Maren Kate Donovan (maren here on HN) founded http://Zirtual.com a startup that lets you outsource assignments to personal assistants in 15, 30, or 60 minute blocks.

stfu2• 14 years ago

Not really sure in how far this is a competitive advantage. At least I can not point at a single outsourcing/personal assistant site, that doesn't offer the option to pay by the hour/minute.

sp3322• 14 years ago

True, I was just trying to summarize it. This page is probably better: http://zirtual.com/how-it-works/

antifuchs• 14 years ago

Wow, this bus yelling thing is pretty creepy behavior.

toumhi• 14 years ago

On a related note, I've started toying with the idea of providing better project management tools to handle projects on odesk (and related websites).

If you outsource work on oDesk, and you feel like the process could use some improvements, I'd love to hear your opinion about this (also, email in my profile).

matznerd3• 14 years ago

oDesk could definitely use some improvement in their tracking software, it can be a pain to use and does not give enough details...

jessedhillon• 14 years ago

This confirms something I learned from many birthday parties as a child: Indian people cannot sing Happy Birthday, for some reason. Anyone who knows the "chicken dance" meme from Arrested Development, where everyone in the family has a different-yet-wrong impression of a chicken -- that's how it is when many Indians get together to try and sing this song.

Also, I think it's a stretch to refer to hiring a stranger to yell a woman's name as "seduction"

danso• 14 years ago

I love that you used that AD reference in a way that I hadn't interpreted before. Assuming this isn't just confirmation bias (remembering only the poorly sung birthday songs), I wonder what about their linguistics/popular music scales would lead to that. Just how Japanese have trouble's with "L"'s and Americans have trouble with rolling-r's (which I think are objectively harder than L's)

vishaldpatel2• 14 years ago

There's a school right behind our home in India. It's pretty big and it's someone's birthday everyday.

School starts at seven in the morning. After prayers in three different religions and the singing of the national anthem, at least one class wishes someone a happy birthday by screaming out the birthday song.

I woke up with a smile everyday =).

dr422• 14 years ago

Amazing even in this modern era how much of culture revolves around mythology and provincialism. If we skipped the flag waving and the mod365 business, not to mention the time wasted bothering the deities (in triplicate) we might actually emerge from this age of mythology with some real progress.

Timothee2• 14 years ago

I found the videos amusing, but I was expecting the post to go in a different direction.

More specifically, I had thoughts at some point of a Twilio app that you could set up to send some SMS on your behalf now and then. (similar to http://bufferapp.com/ seen through another post, but for SMS) A (sad surely) example would be to set up a few variations of "I love you", "thinking of you" to be sent to your significant other during the day. :)

Another thing that I'd actually really like, though I'm not sure how viable/expensive it would be, would be to automate your birthday card sending by having a service that sends you physical birthday cards for you to fill or sign and send to the recipient. I.e. the service has the list of all the people you want to send a card to with their birthdays and address (and more…), and when a birthday approaches, send you a card appropriate for the age with a pre-filled, pre-stamped envelop.

Though, these are more on the automation side, rather than outsourcing.

matznerd3• 14 years ago

I've thought about the buffer for texting and the problem is that you can't send a message from your real number, it would have to be from a separate number, thereby kind of defeating the purpose...

Timothee2• 14 years ago

Oh wow, you're right! I've always thought you could use a verified phone number as the "From" number, but it turns out that's true only for phone calls, not SMS.

From http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/rest/sending-sms:

    Parameter	Description
    From	A Twilio phone number enabled for SMS. Only phone numbers or short codes purchased from Twilio work here; you cannot (for example) spoof SMS messages from your own cell phone number. If you haven't purchased a Twilio number yet you can use the Sandbox Number to send SMS to verified numbers.

I've built many PoCs with Twilio but it seems that I've never tried to send an SMS on behalf of somebody. Good to know, very good to know.

ckdarby• 14 years ago

I outsourced my dating life at one point.

I would hire people to go through a bunch of online dating sites, filter through the results, attempt to initiate conversation and upon a reply I would take over.

This has since been changed to a parsing bot I wrote that utilizes the sites search feature & a bunch of full text searching for keywords.

benjaminwootton• 14 years ago

And who says Romance is dead!

simonsarris• 14 years ago

In the "romantic era" (pick one really) people were paid to write very long and detailed and more-or-less made up love letters, either because the buyer could not write or because they did not have such a way with words.

I would gander that romantic letters are probably the most ghost-written of any category of letter, for all periods in all of time.

stfu2• 14 years ago

I like that idea. Can you give us an idea about the results so far? Would love to see the metrics, i.e. from shifting from a personalized approach to a bot based mechanism. But the main problem I see is that you might get flooded by responses from relatively unattractive candidates as the system seems to have no picture-attractiveness evaluation before initiating the contact.

matznerd3• 14 years ago

How did that work out? I read about this wallstreet guy who kept a meticulous spreadsheet of all the women he met on dates, and she got him to send it to her, then she leaked it all over the net... http://deadspin.com/5902760/finance-guy-keeps-incredibly-det...

mercuryrising• 14 years ago

Ah sweet, now I can pay to have someone else to show the people I care for how much I care for them.

There's really nothing that beats a crappy looking home made card with an actual message in it. It takes less time, money, and has more impact if you make your own cards. Instead of driving the store, clustering around everyone trying to find 'the perfect card', and paying money for an overpriced piece of paper, why not take an 8.5x11 sheet of paper, print/draw something on it, and write a nice message in it?

We outsource the things that should matter most, short of spending time with our loved ones. But when we can outsource that, I'm sure many people will.

scribu• 14 years ago

So you paid the gold price... http://i.imgur.com/wLu8T.jpg

Mz2• 14 years ago

The only thing I really, really need help with and can't seem to figure out on my own is an online income adequate to support myself (or a sudden windfall of at least $50k). I wish I knew how to outsource that for $5.* :-/

* There is evidence I could get some money rolling in if I could get sufficient traffic for my websites. But for the umpteenth time, just this morning someone was telling me how wonderful one of my websites is. Geez, don't tell me. Please tell 500 other people via your twitter account or something. I don't need pats on the head. I need traffic. Why oh why does everyone react that way to me? Can I get this curse removed? Augh.

Outsourcing Birthdays and Flirting

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