Growing up, Rebecca How spent most of her time playing with boys and didn't have the most feminine of mothers. So it's not surprising that today, the 30-year-old account manager at a logistics firm in Atlanta, Ga., has an aversion to high heels, makeup, and all things pink. "I'm completely baffled by the whole being-a-girl thing. I grew up a tomboy, always in pants and T-shirts, and even now I feel awkward wearing skirts," she says. But How is about to re-enter the dating scene after separating from her husband last year and feels she needs to make a change. She wants someone to show her how to be "girlie." It's "not the kind of thing you can learn from a book," she says.

Luckily, we're living at a time when the Internet has made outsourcing just about anything possible -- including learning how to be girlie. So How turned to DoMyStuff.com, an auction website for services, rather than products, launched three months ago with the slogan "Outsource your life." DoMyStuff lets North Americans post tasks and then choose from the respondents who bid on them in a format similar to eBay's. While many people are looking for someone to lend a hand with traditional chores, like dog-walking or housecleaning, others want help with more unusual tasks. A Long Island, N.Y., poster is searching for someone to wait in line for him for an iPhone, while someone in Los Angeles needs a person to help clean his mother's house and throw out her old things. One brave bidder is willing to clean up an Oklahoma resident's mobile home, which also houses eight cats, for $150. "Clean my house -- it's horrible!!" the posting states. Some people are even willing to throw in bonuses, like the farmer in Lexington, Mass., who is looking for someone to take care of the farm animals while the family is away on holiday and promises "free eggs as part of compensation."

The strangest task that Darren Berkovitz, one of the site's co-founders, has seen so far is someone who wanted his ears professionally cleaned. Shockingly, he got seven bids for the job. "I'm sure it's going to get even stranger as we go along," says Berkovitz, one of four twentysomething colleagues at an Internet company in Los Angeles who created the site after Berkovitz joked that he wanted to outsource finding a girlfriend. "We kind of said, 'Wait a second, we're doing all this outsourcing of code writing -- why not outsource the stuff that takes up so much of our time?' You know, going to the grocery store after work, picking up our laundry, cleaning out the garage," he says. "It just kind of flowed from there."

Three months later, DoMyStuff has about 15,000 registered users and 200 active tasks at any given time, each of which is available to bid on for up to a month. Some of the jobs, like Web-based work, can be done from anywhere, but most require a local provider. The majority of people posting tasks are time-starved professionals, Berkovitz says. "I feel that DoMyStuff is a reflection of the busy, 24-7 lifestyle that all of us have, and the need to take back some free time."

Some Web experts are skeptical that DoMyStuff will be able to attract enough service providers who aren't already employed full time to fill every job request. They point to similar sites from the 1990s that didn't succeed. "It always became a race to the bottom, where the people who had valuable knowledge, who wanted a good price for it, were underbid by those who were informed amateurs who just wanted a couple of extra bucks," says Mark Federman, an industry expert and consultant.

But things have changed since then, argues Liss Jeffrey, a new media researcher at the University of Toronto. For one, proven successes like eBay have been around long enough for others, like Berkovitz and his team, to learn from. In addition, "more people take for granted being online," she says, so she's not surprised that outsourcing, which started with big business and filtered down through society, has made its way to the Web. "The more the Internet has a history and is integrated into our lives, the more services like this we're going to see."

As for How's quest to become more girlie, she's not interested in simply accepting the lowest bid. "I wasn't looking for a cheap person," she says. "I'd rather have quality." Unfortunately, none of the seven people who bid on How's task was nearby. But she plans to try again soon, once the site has had a chance to grow. "In theory this is an excellent idea, it's just getting the right kind of person to respond."

Print Article    Send to a Friend    Write a letter to the editor

Digg this Stumble It!   Post to del.icio.us Seed Newsvine   Share on Facebook Technorati links