Amazon.com ‘s Mechanical Turk and Live Work websites have been picking up freelance efforts in this way from all around the world for years now. But in the years it’s been around, it’s only lived on the fringes of the outsourcing business. For the last three years, the Californian start up CrowdFlower has really got into this business, to try to make it a regular part of the average major corporation’s outsourcing plan. CrowdFlower allows businesses to use Mechanical Turk and Live Work and allows them to verify the credentials of the online workers they list too;, and it will keep an eye on quality control in addition, in a way that ordinary freelance classifieds like Amazon’s ventures could never do.

This is quite a fascinating way in which to tap human resources. And it is reminiscent of the way cloud computing works too – with the cloud, you are supposed to not actually have any computing resources yourself; nor are you supposed to have resources earmarked for you at a remote location. You’re just supposed to trust that in all the pooled resources, somewhere, will be something for you at the right time. And it still always turns out to work exactly as if you had your own dedicated arrangements. Crowd Flower allows you to switch on or off an entire global army of qualified labor, and leave it to the managing companies to pick up the loose ends. You could hire your own full-time gopher to do your work, and micromanage and pay that person all the time, or you could farm the work out to a dozen people for a fraction of the pay. You get your results in a fraction of the time too. It isn’t just the small Internet businesses trying to make a quick buck that step into crowd sourcing either. Corporations like Microsoft and Oracle have discovered this as a way of simplifying their little jobs too.

At the opposite end of the crowd sourcing spectrum is the way companies try to harness creativity in the crowd. The French company Eyeka does marketing, or consumer engagement, as it is called, in this way. Companies and brands contact Eyeka to have innovative viral advertising campaigns dreamt up for them. Eyeka’s thousands of members pick up assignments they like and create videos or pictures for the project. If they get picked, they get the job. If it happens to be any good, some young kid out there who’s been putting out videos on his personal YouTube clone for free, suddenly gets a couple of hundred thousand dollars for his trouble. From pennies an hour to hundreds of thousands of dollars, crowdsourcing seems to be finding its niche.

Consumer opinion seems to have trended Twitter towards the creation of two new features for users now: one called Retweet and another called Lists. The thing about these ideas is, not only did Twitter not come up with it on its own, it is not even building them on its own: fanatic Twitter enthusiasts are doing it all for the company. While this is a fresh approach, it isn’t really unheard of. Bug Labs does something similar with its hardware products, giving informed consumers to design and build their own.

Where Twitter stands out is in turning this kind of innovation from an occasional departure to a regular feature of its plan. For instance, the popular way in Twitter of providing a link to the name of anyone who may appear in your post, is to put a “@” symbol in front of their name; this popular way came of a user idea. Twitter accepts features that users think up and popularizes them even when the management doesn’t entirely like it. The wildly popular hash tag used today was a user brainwave that was wildly unpopular with the management at first.

The new feature anticipated now, called Lists, is meant to let people make lists of updates posted by their favorite celebrities or anyone. It is meant to help people make some sense of their voluminous Twitter interests. The other feature of the week, Retweet, has been in unofficial use for a while. Users a time ago formed a casual shorthand term called RT when they wanted to repost someone else’s tweet. Twitter is introducing a way that will perform the same function without increasing text volume by repetition. Now this should be something to Twitter about.