Two Slashes

I actually had another (much more interesting) post lined up for today.  I sent the post to two friends for opinions, but I haven’t heard back from one of them yet.  (And yes, you know who you are!)

I have a hunch...

A few weeks ago, I got wind of a new startup called Hunch.  Without even taking a glance, I dismissed the site as being only minimally useful. Crowd-sourcing only works so well, and it doesn’t take much to game the system (see Mechanical Turk) and get people to dismiss your site just as easily as 4chan.  I was also highly skeptical of the idea of leaving all of the suggestive power to the users.  (Yes, there’s a difference between having a company provide results that might have been sponsored or biased, as that’s identifiable, and having a spammer help push up results that are biased differently, potentially anonymously.)

After reading about some of the interesting correlations Hunch was making about its users, I decided that it might be worth a quick stop by.  (To be honest, I just wanted to see if they would share any more wacky associations that could be made between users. I’m lame like that.)  For someone who finds useless trivia mildly entertaining, it seemed like a good choice at the time, if only to kill some.

However, I quickly realized that Hunch is an excellent aggregator of  personal information.  After all, the entire point of the service is that you voluntarily cough up details about yourself to a corporate entity.  It may not be things like your social security number or your mother’s maiden name, but it’s still personally-identifiable information all the same.  Furthermore, when you think about it, all that’s standing between any other company in the world and your information is a few bucks.  I haven’t heard anything about how Hunch plans to monetize the service, but I see selling information as the only really profitable option.  And I won’t even get into what the ads could be like if the company serving them knew that you were a sucker for brunettes…

The site is also only as useful as the information that gets submitted to it.  (That’s the point, of course.)  Most of the questions are supposed to be user-submitted and users can recommend responses to these questions, but I found that some questions were poorly answered or didn’t properly take all of the responses I had given into consideration.  One question regarding instant messaging clients, for example, suggested I use Adium after I blatantly told the website that I was using Windows.  The last time I checked Adium’s website, the only version of the client available (and it’s quite good, by the way, don’t get me wrong) was the OS X version almost every Mac user already has.  (Also, I should apparently try Botox even though the number of answers against it is greater than the number that support it.  Go figure.)

Really? You're going to tell me what video game I should play based upon a few simple questions and the fact that I like green eggs and ham?

The lack of feelings of legitimacy I get from the site gives me a rather creepy feeling that I’m still hanging out on MySpace, the social network just about everyone with a brain ditched years ago in hopes of avoiding survey after survey detailing how many movies you’ve seen.  Like I said, a lot of the quizzes are pointless or leave much to be desired, and it’s only a matter of time before Facebook and Hunch pair up to display people’s suggestion results in their timeline.  Social suggestion is nothing new (#followfriday, anyone?), but something tells me you’ll get better suggestions from people who actively know and interact with you than you ever will with a website that pairs people off by their love of vegetables.

Site content and utility aside, I know creativity is really hard to find these days (Hollywood, I’m talking to you), but it’s not difficult to avoid ripping off the design of another Web 2.0 startup. Anyone who’s been reading this blog since February has probably realized by now that Hunch seems to have taken a design cue from Plinky…by copying the navigation system.  (To the developers:  I realize that the organization scheme you’ve chosen is natural, but you barely bothered to change the order of anything and it just looks tacky.  In the future, you might want to do a little more research before you end up plagiarizing bits and pieces of other newly-released applications.)

Hunch may be backed by one of Flickr’s co-founders, but I get the feeling that Caterina Fake is more of a one-hit wonder than a repeat trendsetter.  Only time will tell, but this is one website I’m not expecting myself to come back to.  And I have a hunch that most of you won’t be bothering to head over, either.  (I have three invites to hand out if you REALLY want to check it out, though.)

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If it’s easy to pull the wool over your eyes, Wednesday was probably not your day.  If you’re Kathleen Danielson, for example, you avoided any links lest they end up Rickrolls.  I feel that April Fool’s Day is a pretty amusing (and dangerous) time to be an Internet…well, addict, I guess, and it’s a day I particularly enjoy.  (The danger is only compounded if you were spending your day in the fetal position worrying about Conficker, but I’ll get to that in a second.)

Compared to recent years, I think that this year’s bag of tricks was relatively tame.  DeviantArt (at least, as far as I know) wasn’t propogating 4chan memes (mudkips, anyone?) and the most YouTube did was flip videos upside-down.  Sure, ThinkGeek had bacon paste (but who doesn’t love bacon), and it sounds just believable enough that it might end up like their 8-bit tie from April Fools’ past.

I thought this picture only added credibility to my April Fool's joke, even though it was only by coincidence that Rose happened to tag me right after my status change. Apparently I was the only one to think so.

I myself decided to participate, though I didn’t really come up with my pranks until five minutes before midnight.  For starters, I was uncreative enough to be one of the dozens of people changing their relationship status on Facebook.  And, in a stroke of luck, a friend soon tagged me in a photo that made my status change almost believable.  Alas, I didn’t hear anything from my friends when I changed my status to claim that I was in a relationship, but a few friends started an uproar on the return trip.

The other trick started off on a new site of mine.  At the recommendation of Rachelskirts, I purchased the domain ShouldIUseComicSans.com to match a similar offering (thanks, @EricVictorino) only a few hours before, then decided that it changing what it said would be an excellent joke (but for one day only).  People fell for it, too.

I’m trying to come up with even better pranks for next year, though I’m coming up short.  I suppose it doesn’t really matter, as I have 363 more days to dwell on it.  (Suggestions are most welcome, though it might do better to e-mail them so there isn’t a public record to ruin the surprise.)

The corporate giants with the practical jokes weren’t the only people headlining on April 1, though.  Conficker, the latest worldwide scare, managed to slip through the day with very little fanfare.  Of course, there were isolated incidents, like my college campus blaming an outage on the worm, but on the whole I didn’t see too many news articles regarding the blasted thing.  Some people seem to think that this is exactly how it should be, though (and I agree).  However, you can’t deny that the Internet is still wholly intact.  (After all, you’re able to read this post, right?)

And, on a completely unrelated note, I decided to mess around with my dust-collecting Tumblr account.  There’s more information about that posted on the blasted thing, though, so I’ll let you visit if you’re interested in the matter.  (Hey, it could use the traffic anyway.)

Oh, and one more thing:  I’m in a relationship…alright, I don’t think you believed that for a second.  I don’t blame you, though.