Hunch, the new startup from Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, has launched and it’s beguilingly fun. After filling out 42 questions ranging from “Have you sky dived” to “Do you like it when the cabin crew cracks jokes on airplanes?” I was presented with a number of things I might be interested in (I chose which film directors I should watch: Tim Burton). I was hooked enough to fill out the profile page (you can get answers without logging in) and at this point it becomes clear: Hunch is a social network where the social object is sharing questions (and thus answers) which might be relevant to you. The more questions you answer the more your profile page become relevant to you. And you can of course share those questions around with a widget.
I can see also that with the release of their API, Hunch+Twitter would be an awesome combination, and I assume they are building it. If not, someone else should. It will also benefit from Microsoft’s positioning of Bing as an answer engine – useful PR for Hunch.
It’s a shame that the UK’s own decision making engine, Njoyed – now officially deadpooled (last post on it was 5 months ago) – couldn’t get it’s act together. But Hunch could spell good news for Imagini – the UK startup which has perfected a system for profiling users through asking them questions about images, and which has $13.5m in funding. I can certainly see them doing a deal at some point.
There is of course a big issue about how private your data will be on this system. It’s a glib answer but I trust Fake, creator of Flickr, on this one. But it’s a subject that will be continually asked of them.
Just checked out njoyed – last post was 6 days ago, not 5 months …
Fail
Really? I saw 5 months on “All content”. Hey ho.
Congrats Caterina!! Hunch looks like a cool app and I am sure it will be another hit just like like Flickr!
Experience and good ideas make a good match
Just trying it out. Error message every other question, sometimes more. And now it’s broken creating my account. Fail.
looks gimmicky and useless. sorry
I had demoed to web property a couple of months ago. It is pretty cool and useful.
Just demoed it, pretty cool and usefull, with interesting results. one of the cars Icould buy: Lexus GS 460, in third position and BMW X6 XDRIVE35I on the 9 th. Car I’d probably buy: Audi A5 Quattro 40 th. hmmm!?
gotta love the spammers.
I’m not entirely sure what adding Twitter support would bring to Hunch. There’s no point in asking questions of people who haven’t expressed an interest in answering them – it would just be HORRIBLY noisy. It would also be too easy to game and/or spam.
Useless and slow….I can’t even get through the question process – it’s “error”‘ed on me twice already.
Lots of errors (may be it doesn’t like Chrome yet). Yet to give me a hunch. It just asks more & more questions.
Not useful yet.
Maybe is getting overwhelmed by traffic from tc, but like Joe, I can’t go three questions without getting an error.
This looks pretty cool. Whether it actually becomes useful remains to be seen, but I like the idea of a social decision engine. I imagine it will work well, or at least have some utility, for certain kinds of decisions/questions, but not for others. For instance, I’m currently deciding between a Palm Pre and the iPhone 3Gs, and the questions it asked don’t address the subtleties required to actually help me with the decision (predictions on the growth of the app library, more quantitative points on UI, etc.).
It also has a learning curve, with a few too many named concepts (”plays”) for your average user.
That said, I’m a huge fan of the concept. I’ve always felt social network profiles are worthless, and building profiles on questions you’ve answered and creating statistical correlations is a great notion.
Like the concept but an extremely buggy app. QA!!!
Loved the app, but can’t see myself using it more than once. Compete.com shows that the traffic has been falling consistently (102,000 visitors in March versus 29,000 in May)
Btw, this has to be the most ironic line on TC:
“I trust Fake, creator of Flickr, on this one”
God. 2 million dollars wasted on 15 minute timepass activity.
Just hit up http://www.zanomo.com and ask your friends their opinions when it relates to you. It can be more fun than that (somebody got me good) but a cheap site like that does the trick just as good and lets your friends anonymously reply.
Or just use a poll website! I think that site does that too.
I have a hunch that this site will soon be in a deadpool.
A) Takes forever
B) Doesn’t make sense
They must have had some really bad meetings to come up with some thing like this
get Meeting Nazi app and churn out some good ideas http://themeetingnazi.com
My first question was “Do you believe in the inevitable Zombie Apocalypse?”
My Answer: Bring it!
Hunch.com FTW!
I just spent 15 minutes answering dozens of answers, go to my profile and it says ‘Remembered answers: 0′ … FAIL
It keeps on repeating the same questions for me , or erroring, and every now and then asking a new question, after it asked me if i had ever lived where the nearest neighbor was more the 1/4 mile away 8 times(it seems like it, they were interspersed with other questions) I gave up..
I’m getting a endless parade of repeated questions, too. Either we killed it, or we’re some sort of demographic enigma that it can’t identify, so it’s just going to keep asking questions until we die or go insane.
(I had that problem with firefly.com back in the day. Damn thing never did make a recommendation for me; just kept asking me to rate more and more albums. Apparently, I was just too contrary for them to figure out.)
Oh, I thought the repeats were to test if you were REALLY telling the truth! =D
Where’s my free iPod?
Extremely buggy indeed – java failing in question windows just about every other time.
I know it’s their first day live, but c’mon, these are basic functions we’re talking here – and surely they did load testing prior to today to make sure they could handle the traffic from all the inevitable buzz from blogs.
On a positive note, seems like it could be cool if it worked properly…
They spent $2 MILLION on something that anyone with half a brain can decide upon.
Do you really need someone to tell you if you need a convertible? Only a moron would think about using convertible in a rainy day.
Seriously, this will be a giant fail.
YAWWWWN….
I tried it and answered what seemed like endless set of questions and was not at all impressed. Waste of time and surprised TC recommended it.
I think Hunch is pretty cool. I’ve been using it during the beta and I think it has a good success rate predicting the decisions I would have made anyway. The API is a really neat idea and may be their best contribution in the end.
My only issue is that once again it is a national/global destination site and really not organized around the community of people whose opinions and ideas I’m most likely to want and trust.
I’d prefer to go to a local site and ask questions in a less structured way and see what they have to say. For example http://questionland.thestranger.com is for people who read The Stranger in Seattle and Questionland should be available to all cities with alternative weeklies/sites after the upcoming AAN conference.
Hmmm… a possible API candidate for my @question and @answer twitter accounts?
Be far quicker just to ask Twitter the questions…..
This site is essentially a platform for user-generated quizzes — where meaningless answers to meaningless questions are translated into meaningless advice. Sorry, I’m having trouble enough removing such items from my Facebook feed, forget spending time on a site dedicated to this concept.
Is there a quota of stories that have to mention Twitter per day at TechCrunch? We get it: You guys are Twitter boosters. But I’m sure it has nothing to do with any investments. BTW, I like Hunch a lot.