How to increase your Dropbox's free space with Amazon Mechanical Turk - for a minimal cost

UPDATE 2012/03/04: MTurk sent me an email warning me about violation of TOS. Please read the details here before creating and publishing the HIT I'm describing in this blog entry.


If you don't know Dropbox, you should be using it right now. It's a litte piece of software that lets you sync a folder between computers using Internet. It gives you an initial capacity of 2 GB, plus increases of 250 MB for each guy or gal who installs it with a special link. Download and install from here and both of us will get 250 MB ;)

There are a lot of ways of gaining space in Dropbox for free (you don't need to pay a monthly or yearly fee to use the space), like using Google AdWords or using this cheapskate guide - or recommending it to your friends. But what if we don't want to use AdWords, and we have no more friends to recommend it?

I've recently gained aditional 2 GB using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Each 250 MB cost U$ 0.2, and all 2 GB was added to my account in about 17 minutes. Pretty fast and cheap, right? A total of U$ 1.6 - less than two bucks! The process is simple: create a new account with Amazon, then create a new task in mturk that includes YOUR referral link.

STEPS

1. If you don't have it, create an account with Amazon.

2. Go to mturk website and sign in as requester.

3. Add some credit to your account. Go to Prepay MTURK HIT (Human Intelligence Task). 

4. Go to Design tab.

5. Select any template you wish, we are gonna change it anyway (for example, Basic Open-Ended Question).

6. Set up the new HIT template. Read all explanations and fill the fields acording to that. This is what I typed:

"Describe your HIT" Section

Title: Install and register with dropbox

Description: Install and register with dropbox

Keywords: software, installation, windows, linux, mac

"Working on your HIT" Section

Time allotted per assignment: 1 Hours

HIT expires in: 7 Days

Mechanical Turk Masters: Do not require that workers be Masters to do your HITs

Aditional qualifications: I cleared everything. We need everyone try to do this HIT.

Require qualification for preview: No

"Paying Workers" Section

Reward per assignment: $ 0.2

Number of assignments per HIT: (The number of people you wish to do this HIT. Start with a low number, like 3)

Results are automatically approved in: 20 Days (Here we want a high number, because we need to check that the worker did a good job)

7. Click on "Design Layout" yellow button.

8. On the toolbar, click on "Edit HTML Source". Select all and delete it. Then copy and paste the code shown here http://pastebin.com/vjMz9Vq8 BUT change this text http://db.tt/G5gv7vw with your own referral link. If you don't know your referral link, look for it here once you've sign in in dropbox website. The page will look like this, but with your own referral link, of course:

click to zoom in

The worker have to follow the steps and then write the email she used to create his new dropbox account. Because when you receive additional space dropbox send you an email, you'll know who did a good job and who wants only your money.

9. Click on "Preview and Finish" button. Then click on "Finish" button.

10. Now let's publish the HIT. Go to "Publish" tab and select the task you've just created. In my case, it is called: Dropbox. It will show a preview, click on "Next" button and review your batch properties, including what will cost you. Click on "Publish Hit" and wait for new space to arrive :D

click to zoom in

Now is time to manage your hit, and wait to approve what your workers did. Go to "Manage" tab, then click on "Batches in progress (1)" and wait until the green bar fills (100%).

click to zoom in

Then click on Results button, and you'll see a table listing your Workers emails. Check the rows whose emails are equal at your dropbox notifications email and then click the approve button. If there is emails that you don't recognize, just check again the rows and click on "reject" button, and write an explanation like: "you did not followed the instructions of the task." Please Always pay for the correctly done HITs.

That's it! Enjoy!