(FWIW it took a few YEARS before I was able to explain tagging and group behavior on delicious cogently. This process is not surprising.)

So, yes, it's a bit like mechanical turk. Hopefully some of the usage will be driven by participatory urges rather than getting 5c per transaction (though we will probably empower that sort of payment, and more. Offers etc.)

So if I were to give advice, I would say to have coffee with PG and give him your pitch. He's magical. Regardless, grats on the launch!

Having been to more than a few demo days myself, I think this is a much broader thing than YC cos tend to do.

"Human.io lets you to script with humans as easily as you would script with software. It does for the digital economy what the assembly line did for the industrial economy.

The software allows you to dynamically assemble ad hoc armies of virtual workers, who are then assigned to complete tasks in the real world using the sensors and input devices on their phones: GPS, camera, microphone, and so on.

Let's say you want to X. Human.io lets you..."

Still not perfect, but I think it's a little more clear than what you have.

Sample human API tasks: 1. photo scavenger hunt 2. parking garage availability 3. male to female ratio in a club 4. collect blind auction bids

I'm imagining a headline like "Things that used to be really really hard, but are easy with Human.io" and then pictures and captions describing the use cases.

    (V)(°,,°)(V)

That was our thinking when we first started working on human.io. If GMaps lets you invoke methods on a map, and Twilio on a phone, what would it mean to invoke methods on a person?

I think it's important to have that first, otherwise you are burying the lead. Although I can see why you wouldn't want to prematurely niche yourself, I don't think the pitch about engaging your users is especially compelling.

"what would it mean to invoke methods on a person?"

I mean ultimately you want to be selling the benefits and not the features, so I think being able to communicate the implications of that statement are much more important than being able to come up with a snappy analogy for the statement itself.

If you're really committed to staying neutral on usage though, we already have the term HCI for human-computer interaction. So maybe you could describe it as an HCI programming language or something.

The problem is that what we have built is very, very broad, so narrowing it is difficult.

The platform lets you send people little bundles of UI and have them interact. That's incredibly broad and vague!

So here are some examples: You could get them to take pictures of all the storefronts in a town. You could send them realtime surveys to go along with a television show. You could have them rate sessions at a conference. You could have someone be notified when they walk onto a car dealership and offer them the chance to look up car prices.

Explaining this with one line has been very difficult so far. My favorites so far are: 1) Turn a passive audience into engaged particpants. 2) Turn your audience int your army.

That's marketing speak.

How about: "Let's say you want to build a website that shows the different rates for parking garages around San Francisco, but you don't have the pricing data. Human.io can help you get hoards of strangers to run around the city, snapping pictures of pricing signs at garages, and uploading the pictures to you. Viola, now you have the data."

Is that vaguely what human.io can do?

You could do all sorts of things. How do I wrap it up into one sentence without marketing speak?

Edit to add: "a Mechanical Turk for tasks not easily done at a computer" isn't a bad description either.

...ask users to vote on them using human.io

  humans = init({ count:100, gender:male });

  task_navigate   = task({ type:navigate, uri:{latitude:123, longitude:456} });
  task_photograph = task({ type:photograph });

  for (human in humans) {
    human->task(task_navigate);
    human->task(task_photograph);
  }

(I know that's not what it does. But just illustrating my point. Don't make me, the user, figure it out. Just tell me.)

I have been playing the Photohunt and am currently in the lead - it is very fun! Thanks for building the Human API - I have many great ideas using this and have been taking notes to help improve the process. Contact me Hacker @ myusername ORG

It's still not clear to me whether the Human.io users are tagging photos you send them or taking new photos or what.

Everything is generated by the client. The tasks, the photos, the voting, are all happening in the human.io client. The rest is just driven around by the script. They write to a database, and the web page is just pulling from that database.

This would be easier for you to see if you installed the human.io client.