If you’ve heard of 99Designs then Google’s latest venture, Prizes.org, which has just been launched on the quiet yesterday will feel familiar.

In essence, Prizes.org allows you to create a contest for tasks on nearly any topic you choose – not just graphic design jobs but anything from tips for hassle-free plane journeys with kids, help naming a company, new running route suggestions and so on.

Google Prizes.org homepage screenshot

The team responsible for the creation of this crowd sourcing site is a largely autonomous team that Google acquired last year called Slide. Before you create a contest you must purchase credits (1 credit costs $1 USD). At the moment the platform is in Beta and is only open to contest creators that have a “credit history” meaning they have to have participated in or created contests in the past, but this restriction will likely be lifted eventually.

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Lately two of the biggest social media sites, Facebook and Twitter, have been rolling out updates and experiments, which is great because we all love new features and improvements. But recently Facebook has had issues with its newest terms of service that caused so much of a stir it had to retract them and revert back to the old version. Now its latest change involves what I can only see as a step very firmly into Twitter’s domain.

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