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.)