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Zack Whittaker of ZDnet’s iGeneration blog has posted about Microsoft Task Market, and has called it a great way of being productive in your home while “being in pyjamas�. And for some unknown reason, he couldn’t get it to work,
I will say at this point, if you can actually get it to work, you’re in luck. I tried it on a variety browsers: Firefox 2 failed, Firefox 3 failed, Internet Explorer 7 failed, however Internet Explorer 8 emulating IE7 does seem to work. If you can’t see it, try downloading IE8 or just see a screenshot of Task Market that I’ve uploaded. If MSR-Asia can get this fixed, I can’t see this site not taking off.
Although I had no such issues and got to sign in easily. An eye catching thing I found was that, Windows Cardspace can be used to sign in to Task Market which has yet to make way on the popular Windows Live services that we use. So much for promoting your own technology.
If you’ve ever used a free lancing website, you’ll feel right at home. After signing in for the first time, you set up your profile, and also your Paypal account. The jobs are called tasks, and you can either post tasks, or find tasks and complete them for the give price. Transactions are made through Paypal, although as Zack points out
The system isn’t foolproof though. Once the poster has accepted your work, that’s when they will pay you.
This is a major concern for anyone who is willing to free lance for some hard earned money. You could get scammed and not even be able to do anything about it. But as it’s a tech preview, proceed with caution.
The categories of tasks on Task Market are
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Writing
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Translation
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Editing
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Design
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Other
Other? As ridiculous as it is to name a category other on a free lancing website, I’m sure they could have come up with anything better then this. I suggest, that they go take a look at www.getafreelancer.com. There are a lot of categories of jobs there but no “other�. There could be a million possibilties to what an other job can be, and I for one wouldn’t want to bother about them.
It’s strange for Microsoft to not have a category of programming, which would really attract a lot of free lancers as well as job posters to this website.
Apart from this, they have options to restrict access on a task, so that potential task seekers will have to request access before they can see the task in details. And I have yet to find a task that doesn’t require access. It seems people who post ads in newspapers are stupid to do that, as they should make people require access to the details as well.
The tasks also have the usual commenting system, which also has private and public settings. And also, a reputation system is there so you can know how reliable the person is.
Overall, as excited as I was to read about Task Market, I’m as much let down by using the website. Agreed, that it’s a Tech Preview. But really I’ll pass on this one. There are many well respected and great free lancing websites on the Internet and I don’t see Task Market capable enough to make any impact on their market. Not at least in the near future. I hope Microsoft Research Asia do some more research and really make Task Market a capable platform and improve on it as it can be a hit if it improves on the above things.
 
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