I’ve been looking at Caterina Fake’s new web service, Hunch.
It’s kind of a cross between Ask Metafilter and Match.com – a recommendation service based on the system’s understanding of your personality/preferences and the choices that people similar to you have already made.
In 10 questions or less, Hunch will offer you a great solution to your problem, concern or dilemma, on hundreds of topics. Hunch’s answers are based on the collective knowledge of the entire Hunch community, narrowed down to people like you, or just enough like you that you might be mistaken for each other in a dark room. Hunch is designed so that every time it’s used, it learns something new. That means Hunch’s hunches are always getting better.
Caterina Fake was one of the founders of Flickr and the new service shares some of the converstational interface style of Flickr, which can be a bit annoying after a while. The system itself actually works quite well and seems to get better each time I visit as more people register and the system learns more. A lot of the questions are silly (‘Should I take a bath or shower?’), but there’s some good stuff in there too (‘Should I buy a Blu-Ray player?’ – no, apparently).
