Hunch Goes Live. It’s Neat!

By  |  Monday, June 15, 2009 at 3:33 am

HunchHunch, a new site from Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake, has just opened its doors to all comers. You might describe it as a sort of mashup of Yahoo Answers, Wikipedia, and any Facebook quiz that helps you determine stuff like just who your favorite member of the Three Stooges is. Except that wouldn’t come anywhere near adequately conveying how clever and distinctive this decision-making tool is. Or how outstandingly good its user interface is.

When you arrive at Hunch, it starts asking you questions about yourself, from the relatively straightforward:

Hunch

…to the downright eccentric:

Hunch

Hunch is asking you stuff in the interest of getting to know you better, and thereby providing you with better answers to questions. And answering questions is the site’s stock in trade. It does so via mini quizzes on topics of all sorts, from the practical to the playful:

Hunch

The quizzes ask you more questions:

Hunch

And then provide you with advice:

Hunch

At this early point in its life, what’s most interesting about Hunch isn’t the quality of its advice–with the topics I’ve been through so far, it’s been reasonable but kind of predictable. (The quiz on campy cult movies suggested I watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show–I didn’t need Hunch to figure that out.) Rather, it’s how the quizzes get built–which is by Hunch users, who can build new quizzes from scratch, edit existing ones, and rate the quality of ones they take. It’s intensely collaborative, and if Hunch takes off, it’s easy to believe that there will be a profusion of advice on topics of all sorts, and that it’ll be deep, useful, and non-obvious.

Hunch’s interface–both for taking quizzes and constructing or refining them–is a thing of joy. Reminiscent of Flickr in all the right ways, it’s clean, fun, and really, really fast. That makes using Hunch a pleasure right now; more important, it increases the chances that the service will catch on and get the large numbers of users it needs to ensure a diverse and useful repository of questions and answers. It certainly gives it a leg up on a vaguely similar, less slick service with…almost the same name, sort of: Lunch.

If you check out Hunch, let us know what you think. Here’s Caterina Fake’s blog post on the launch.

 
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4 Comments For This Post

  1. Tim Robertson Says:

    Neat, will have to check out when I have more time.

  2. Anne Says:

    Nice post Harry.

    I read a little bit about what hunch is in few other articles. So to add on to your post, Hunch is a new concept, but it’s probably best described in terms of the familiar. Fake says it’s a hybrid of several different ideas, similar in some ways to both Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers, but different in others.

    Would like you to go through this article which talks a lot on the concept of hunch, what it is & what it is not and also how smart it is. Here is the link –
    http://www.webguild.org/2009/06/hunch-a-real-decision-engine.php?p=p2

  3. Charles Borwick Says:

    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.

  4. Dave Zatz Says:

    I don’t get it. (Would it have predicted that response?)

1 Trackbacks For This Post

  1. Hunch Tries Again Says:

    […] on every imaginable topic–”Do you like the smell of Play-Doh?”–and I thought it was pretty neat at the time. But I haven’t been back often, and Hunch doesn’t seem to have become massively popular […]