Earlier today Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake announced the release of her latest startup, Hunch, in private beta. The site revolves around helping users make decisions spanning a wide array of topics. To help users make their decisions, Hunch presents them with a brief series of questions that have been submitted by other members, using their responses to help them make their ultimate decision. It’s a great idea that combines the crowd-sourced nature of Wikipedia with services like Yahoo Answers. But does it work? We’ve managed to get our hands on an invite to the service, and have put it to the test.
From the start, it is clear that the site is very clean and unintimidating despite an already-large amount of data. Users are presented with a handful of featured topics on the homepage, most of which have been ‘played’ through many times before so they have complete sets of questions and answers. To the right of the page is a widget enticing users to anwer questions about themselves, which helps the system make more accurate judgements (the placement of the widget is clever – users are constantly invited to participate but aren’t forced to toil through a lengthy initial signup to ‘teach’ the system). And the questions used to analyze users are actually pretty fun (I was asked goofy questions such as “Do you believe in alien abductions” along with more conventional questions like “Where do you live”).
The bottom of the home page includes social features, including an activity feed and a listing of active users and members who are most similar (and dissimilar) to you. The site appears to employ a Twitter-like ‘follow’ system, so you can keep tabs on your favorite users.
All in all the site looks slick, but does Hunch really have all the answers?
At this point the site covers around 500 subjects, ranging from topics on computers and gadgets to relationships and dating. Some of the questions are just for amusement (which Star Wars character am I?), but most of them aspire to be genuinely helpful. After picking a question you’d like to have answered, the site presents a series of multiple choice questions (you always have the option to skip a question if you don’t know how to answer it). At the end, the system presents an answer, along with its next-best guesses ranked according to how confident it is with its decision.
For example, say you were looking to decide between purchasing either a PC or a Mac. The site will present a series of structured questions set up by other users, such as “What do you intend to use the computer for?” In theory this is supposed to be better than asking the question on a general Q&A site like Yahoo Answers, because you won’t have to deal with the bitter flamewars that inevitably result. After entering ten questions or fewer, the system will spit out your answer.
The questions asked by Hunch, and ultimately the decisions it produces, are determined by user input. After ‘playing through’ each decision, users are asked if they don’t agree with the results, and can vote to change the way their answers were judged. Hunch also keeps track of which of the questions it asks have objective answers (”How much are you willing to pay?”) and which of them are more subjective, weighting each of these accordingly and taking the user’s personality profile into account. For those topics that are highly controversial (like the aforementioned Mac vs PC decision), Hunch also tracks items that are seeing a large amount of activity and can regulate them.
I ran through a number of trial questions, ranging from deciding if I should rent or buy a car to figuring out a good line to use on a date. For the most part I was impressed, though it quickly became clear that Hunch isn’t capable of magically making up your mind for you. After walking through questions I was often met with answers that were presented with around 55% certainty – not nearly enough to blindly follow Hunch’s guidance. Hunch would provide explanations for why it felt a certain option was best for me, but the fact of the matter is that decisions are rarely black and white, and there isn’t much Hunch can do about that.
At this point I’m optimistic about Hunch – the site still has too few users to really be considered comprehensive, but many of the questions and resulting decisions I found were genuinely helpful. That said, Hunch is still going to be fighting an uphill battle: most people have been using resources like Wikipedia, Google, and Yahoo Answers to conduct research for years, and it’s going to be tough to break them out of the habit no matter how well Hunch works.
Tom Smykowski: It was a “Jump to Conclusions” mat. You see, it would be this mat that you would put on the floor… and would have different CONCLUSIONS written on it that you could JUMP TO.
Michael Bolton: That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my life, Tom.
Samir: Yes, this is horrible, this idea.
sounds like somebody has a case of the Mondays
@Alex: Most appropriate comment of the year award to you, sir.
but…but…they took my stapler…
you sir, are a genius and a gentleman. I literally laughed out loud. Thanks!
Might be good, if access to relevant info on web for self research also provided.
Will surely have fun value for trivial decisions, as the technology matures, it may appeal to enterprise and there could be paid decision trees for organizations to buy and further customize. Will help them retain critical tacit knowledge (problem solving and decision skills) by making key employees create decision trees for things they are best at.
Having said that, to have more than entertainment value it will take a lot of time, till then people will still prefer using their Hunch and Hunch of their friends.
good points. getting a collective “second opinion” from the web is inherently the norm these days so they’re on the right track, but i think it would take a team-up w/ a twine-esque/semantic web model to put it over the top.
hmm, asking a computer your life decisions. I just created a satire cartoon in my head: anyone have a cartoon of a person on a couch and a laptop/computer screen sitting in the chair next to them w/ a pen and pad (or smart phone) asking “…and how did that make you feel?”
They need a knowledge inference engine. In this way, they can answer specific questions in a specific domain, such as questions for buying a computer. The best that I can think off is an adaptive-CBR (case-based-reasoning) inference system, ie, a hybrid CBR. Not only that the knowledge base will grow (ie, new knowledge captured by the system) but it can also learn and adapt.
The best book about hybrid system based CBR I have come across is the following:
Soft Computing in Case Based Reasoning
CTO at Hunch must look to recruit individuals from the soft-computing field (fuzzy & machine-learning hybrid computing), perhaps look no further than BISC (Berkeley Initiative in Soft-Computing) group.
just 5 days ago i watched the film
lol
I concur, comment of the year.
Smart if: You need a crowd-mind to help you make up your own and give you basic pointers
Bad if: You are looking for unique, different and smart ideas!
Prob a hit considering the ‘brain power’ of the median person.
AND:
“The more Hunch learns about each individual user’s personality and preferences, the better Hunch can customize decision results for that user. [...]”
-> It’s just one more Big-Brother-We-Want-To-Know-Everything-About-You thing:
Combine hunch with the fact that it is now possible to identify even the holders of anonymous accounts in social networks, it means sooner or later that you’re about to set up a public webcam in your living room when you use this kind of sites.
Good luck.
I just tried it out, and I think y’all are taking it way too seriously. It seems to me that it’s aimed for fun, for decisions where people actually want to introduce a bit of randomness / novelty. Not really my thing, but I can see the potential mass appeal. After all, that’s often the way people use Facebook and Twitter too.
But I think they might have warned users: “For entertainment purposes only.”
A clarification. I played with the system a bit more, and I could see how a tool like this could be used for more serious decisions, particularly if enough people use it and feed it knowledge. But I’m partial to decision-making approaches that feel more deterministic and offer the user control over the process. I’ll be curious to see how others react to this approach.
So much innovation going on in assisted Q&A right now mixing social intelligence with machine learning. Aardvark is another one.
Serious question: How do they make money?
Obviously any answer that includes the words eyeballs, advertising or sponsors is not going to get them far. If Facebook and Twitter can’t monetize all their users, I have a Hunch neither can this new site.
I sincerely hope the answer is not: “We’re not focused on revenue, we’re focused on getting users and building out the platform.” In 2009, that qualifies any site as a hobby (an expensive one to be sure), not a company.
Nonetheless, this is a fun, creative concept. I *hope* they have an innovative way to make money, and wish them all the best.
They did mention how they will make money (roughly). Apparently it is gonna be a mix between google adsense and amazon business model.
So, lets say when if you ask: “What is the best brand to wash my delicate underwear?” and after eventually getting your answer, they will *recommend* (basically an ad) you a place/site to buy the brand that is specified in your answer.
Currently they are using Amazon referrals but i think Caterina mentioned at some point they will approach advertisers directly. Pretty solid business model if you ask me.
Don’t make TechCrunch ask such difficult questions when the cover a new tech bizness
It will be interesting to see if this is successful given the perceived amount of user interaction required. With Google, there is immediate satisfaction. Now, it may very well be that answering questions ultimately produces better results, but will people go to the trouble. Definitely an interesting experiment.
MANY years ago I wrote a helpdesk system like this. It used a soundex like thing to store the question. After a month of use I had lots of questions. Now the users would enter their problem and click “Search for an answer”. It would find the top 5 questions that matched theirs and display the questions. They could look at each one and the answer to see if it answered THEIR question. If it did they selected the option “This solved my problem.” If not, their question was submitted to IT. As time went on, this worked better and better. After a year 8 out of 10 questions were answered by the system and IT didn’t need to get involved.
Hunch sounds very familiar and as you said, after getting more users involved and more data, it could be really good. I’m looking forward to the public beta!
Just tried it out.
First Impression – WTF is this?
Second Impression:
The idea may be semi-good but execution is too complicated. When you have Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Answers, Email, Telephone, all which which delivers a similar concept (some within their site), but with a very simple interface, so simple that even my mother will use it, this service may need to go back and take out a lot of unnecessary features/distraction within the site that makes it look very tedious.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, it is a cool concept but for example, if they were to keep it simple for instance, having some sort of twitter like interface with a little more meat to differentiate and process the questions and answer, i think it will be easier to process and might stick with users.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong, it is a cool concept but for example, if they were to keep it simple for instance, having some sort of twitter like interface with a little more meat to differentiate and process the questions and answer, i think it will be easier to process and might stick with users.”
huh?
completely agree with Chris S. it’s kind of neat and very gimmicky but could never, would never use it for anything serious and doubt anyone else will either. they might want to retool and use it as a way to teach children.
I signed up and didn’t get an email – are there limited invites? Are they manually replying?
I know quite a few people who have taken the “where should you live” quiz on Facebook. It’s meant to be fun/entertainment. Some stuff like this can get big because people want to have fun, but better to make it a Facebook and/or iphone app than a standalone website.
I just heard about a really cool start up that also just launched beta this week, http://www.intheglo.com. Flickr made me think of this site because its a marketplace for people to sell goods or services through video listing. The founders are apparently trying to break through the threshold of seller/service provider- relationships that ebay and craigslist have yet to get past. I think its pretty cool. My roommate went to college with the founder. Definitely worth checking out.
And this relates to the post how? Spamming blogs is incredibly unprofessional.
Worth checking out…if you tend to respect advice given in anonymous blogspam.
Disregard that I suck cocks
Disregard that I suck cocks
this is a really clever idea. Kudos to the founder Caterina. I could most definitely use this kind of help.
How is this any different than 20Q.net?
Just asking. I mean, it’s cool and everything, but isn’t it just sort of a parlor trick?
This may be a very short term meme at best, but it has no lasting value and will quickly die. Hate to use an over used term, but no longtail.
This is a PET ROCK IDEA. Enough of these, people. “Pet Rock” ideas are those usually
created by chums of other chums all of whom
are way to pleased with themselves that they
got someone to overpay for their most recent
‘Pet Rock’ company.
We have *real* problems we can work on, such as:
- antigravity
- using glow-in-the-dark deep water fishes as a
starting point for new battery technology
- developing public-key random-spectrum
communications gear to leverage underutilized
parts of the spectrum
- an whatnot
Psssh, Totally.
Nice.
I’m working on a project for whatnot right now.
I dunno about this one. Usually creators like this are one hit wonders.
remember Vimeo and Jakob Lodwick ??
He never came back.
http://www.stat...090313b-eng.htm
I would like to applaud the US at this time for shedding the Canadian jobs FIRST before ours. Thanks USA.
I know my software job is safe because some Canadian is eating corn syrup based “maple product” in a gutter some where trying to stay alive in the harsh winter rambling in French.
You can’t innovate in a country that has so much freakin’ rain and/or snow.
Just getting to work is a challenge, and at least 1 work day in their Canadian 4 day European socialist culture week is canceled because of the weather.
For a week of salary pay, you’ll only get 3 days of work out of a canuck, probably less out of a french one.
So yeah, you have a point.
You also can’t hire commuters in a country where gas costs over twice as much as the US national average.
Probably some of the good reasons companies axed Canadian jobs before the US ones.
Perhaps some harsh economic stress will prompt them to change their ways. That would be nice.
The leader of the parlaimentary Monarcy of that country needs to
A. kill socialized medicine completely.
B. declare independence from the UK
C. imprison the governor general for life and or hold an execution.
D. destroy the heritage program, BDC, and all other irresponsible programs signed off by the Queen of the country disposed of in step B that make gas cost twice as much and force a GST
E. quit and allow people to directly elect a leader who is not chosen by his peers but rather by the public.
F. Change the flag. Nobody wants a dumb looking flag like that.
G. Get rid of language preferences in the constitution and grant FULL freedom of speech as we have in America. This would also kill law 101, and Louisiana-itize Quebec. Which is a VERY good thing. This should have happened 100 years ago.
Until that happens, the situation will get worse for them.
Once again, Chris has gone off his meds.
Dude, take a breath and go outside. No one cares about your anti-Canadian rants.
I wonder how much money did they cough up to get their hands on the domain name hunch.com…… must have been a pay day for the squatter
The examples in the article looked familiar to me for some reason… then it struck me — it is like the troubleshooting scripts you get in the help-troubleshooting systems like in Windows XP or 98 which ask you questions about your problem and giving possible directions to take and asking if you want to pursue them or take a different option.
I can see this system as being something like that, though bigger in scale and essentially learning as it grows much the way Wikipedia grows as people add information to it. Of course it only grows as it can with capable people adding their own 2 cents to it.
~ Darrell
hahaha This is great!
Flickr was born out of this exact model, but for pictures. I think it was Bradly H. who was telling the story of ‘free labour’ in an effort to tag images, whilst the crowd played a word association game.
Clever model put to great use. Obviously the founders are greatly experienced to tackle this.
I like it. Very sound idea.
if you want ordinary decisions rely on ordinary people
I have a hunch it will do ok
nice work Caterina {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/IKpHqdb419_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”nice work Caterina ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/SYf5MnFb9r”}}}
Very well-written post!!! Please check out my site as well at http://macmaniapodcast.com
Still waiting on my invitation too. I wanted to test this out since a friend recently set up a site with a similar idea – except there people get to actively vote on decisions –
http://www.voteonmylife.com
Just visited: http://www.voteonmylife.com/
I like it. Interesting idea that’s nice and simple.
Thanks for the link
http://youtube.com/befryxell
And Flickr made money how? Actually, Fuckr was is a money sinkhole.
So will this be. Their monetization scheme can be quckly replicated by every long tail content company and retailer. It’s called affiliate marketing and shopping portals. Nextag? Shopzilla.com? Perhaps you’ve heard of them? Oh yeah and then there’s this site called amazon. And um, facebook which could have an app running tomorrow. Oh and aardvark. And mahalo and evri and yahoo answers and and and
Shall I continue?
“people have been using resources like Wikipedia, Google, and Yahoo Answers to conduct research for years, and it’s going to be tough to break them out of the habit no matter how well Hunch works.”
Not sure I agree with this statement. A better mousetrap can usually find it’s place in the market as long as there are not costs with switching. But what is the competitive advantage of hunch? This tailored questionnaire system to help the user problem solve seems to be new in this arena (at least new to me). BTW, for those who want an invitation to use hutch, just go to the home page and type in your email address.
http://www.hunch.com/
i love it. right now, it’s kind of like an online magic 8 ball. i bet 90% of the queries are going to be around a small number of questions and there will be millions refining those questions. i really dig it. caterina perhaps is indeed a visionary.
It’ll potentially help you clarify your thinking or think of things you hadn’t considered. Great.
And you don’t really have to change people’s habits of going to wikipedia, you just need good SEO and this is potentially great SEO.
People type questions into search engines all the time.
were it not for fake’s association with the site, it wouldn’t even make the d-list. and outside of techcrunch and valleywag, who even gives a toss about that factoid?
this tool will go down in flames like every other whiz-bang reco tool…its called the cold-start problem people. yeah in twenty years this thing might write your dissertation for you given enough seeding from users…but how do you convince them to do the work? amazon solved the problem by getting people to seed the database while they were doing something else (shopping). no such luck here. my guess is the cold-start problem will be too hard to overcome
foo@foo has a point, if anything was noteworthy about the sale of flickr, it was the firesale price it went for. butterfield and fake practically gave it to yahoo. not that they had much choice, the burn rate on properties serving large media files is indeed high.
and whats with the video comments? like we give a fuck to put a face to your asinine drivel? get over yourselves children
This does sound interesting. Let me try it..
just trying it out. first thing, it’s a bit of work to get it going. you must answer a lot of questions and it’s not clear when you might get the right answers, if ever! hunch is different.
This is pretty cool. It reminds me of some articles on eHow.com with decision trees for figuring stuff out.
For an alternative, I coded up a tool at http://www.topwhatever.com to help me make decisions with “Decision Matrices”… helps you weight options and make subjective decisions objectively.
I don’t like to spam, but thought people interested in Hunch might be interested in TopWhatever. Thanks
it was super fun to answer the questions (especially with a group of friends). don’t know what more i will be able to squeeze out of it, beyond the novelty, but i will keep poking and playing.
my thoughts so far: http://web-poet...09/03/28/hunch/
its just a brilliant idea!
It’s great to see people innovating around Q&A because after all one the main things people want to do online is get their questions answered.
Strangely, no one has yet provided a turnkey solution so that sites can provide their own Q&A. Seemed an obvious gap, so we did it:
http://www.yousaidit.com.
I hope this site would have been Live when MATRIX released.
Mr. Anderson would have posted query on hunch.com asking “Red pill or Blue pill?”
sounds like a to early April fool (Fake?)
How pissed off Ask.com must be of Hunch. This is what they always wanted with Ask Jeeves, but could not achieve properly into rev model. I’m pretty sure there will be many Hunch type properties popping up everywhere.