The Co-founder of Flickr, Caterina Fake, talked about her new venture appropriately named Hunch.com

A very interesting concept, paired with a great, easy to remember domain, should make this site one of the next BIG Web 2.0 sites.  We had the myspace.com period, then facebook.com, now twitter.com is all the rage.

Looking for the next HOT thing, we may have found it

On Ms. Fake’s blog, she announced that invitations have gone out to her friends and people who registered on Hunch.

“””We’re going to be launching the full public site in the coming months, but for now — invitations!”””

So according to the blog here is the low down on the new site:

“””What is Hunch?
Look. Decision-making is difficult, and decisions have to be made constantly. What should I be for Halloween? Do I need a Porsche? Does my hipster facial hair make me look stupid? Is Phoenix a good place to retire? Whom should I vote for? What toe ring should I buy?

It’s dark and lonely work. Coin-flipping, I Ching consultation, closing your eyes and jumping, postponing the inevitable, Rock-Paper-Scissors, and asking your sister are all time-honored means of coming to a decision  and yet we think there’s room for one more: Hunch.”””

“”””Hunch is a decision-making site, customized for you. Which means Hunch gets to know you, then asks you 10 questions about a topic (usually fewer!), and provides a result — a Hunch, if you will. It gives you results it wouldn’t give other people.”””

Decision Trees

“”””
Take a question often asked by tech-clueless family and friends: Should I switch to a Mac? If you ask someone who knows a lot about computers she’ll start by asking you additional questions, like “What do you plan to use the computer for?” or “How much money are you willing to spend?”. Then she’ll give you an informed suggestion.

If you don’t have an expert handy you can try posting the question on a Q&A site, but you’ll often end up with arguments,  even flamewars!,   about the merits of PCs vs Macs. Or you can read lots of reviews and informational sites about Macs and PC – effectively become an expert yourself – but who has the time? Those toe rings are not going to buy themselves.

On Hunch, people can create a Topic (as we call it) that acts like a human expert, getting to a decision by asking relevant follow up questions and weighing trade offs. We think that it can ultimately save people lots of strenuous cognitive labor: not everyone who buys a computer needs to become a computer expert.”””

The following information is from the Hunch.com site:

Hunch Decision-Making Site Expands Preview to Public

Hunch (www.hunch.com), which has been in a small-scale preview period for the last few months, is expanding its preview access today to people requesting an invitation.

Enough about me, let’s talk about you
In addition to helping you climb the decision tree, Hunch asks you a bunch of questions about yourself to find out more about what you’re like and what you like. Hunch creates a kind of “taste profile” of you and people like you, which combine with topic-specific questions to deliver a hunch just for you. This is still very nascent — we’ve had fewer than 200 people using the site so far — but the more people use it, the better it will get.

You Gee See
You can create topics — which are the “Super Questions” — edit topics, add questions, edit questions, add results, edit results — the bulk of the decision asking apparatus is user-changeable. As such Hunch looks a lot like Wikipedia circa 2001 — mostly potential. Hunch staff, their friends, and other people whose arms we’ve twisted have contributed the 500 seed topics you see there today.

Contributor site for now, full site later
Hunch is currently a “contributor” or “power user” version of the site. It’s not really ready for general use, as it needs a lot of people using it to get better. Right now it’s like visiting Wikipedia in 2001. Later, the logged out, bunny hill version will be simple– ask questions, get results. We’ll get to know the user in the simplest possible way, then help them make decisions — just click and click and click.

Bold! Different! We’re not biting ankles. We’re not tagging along. Hunch is a new, odd, risky thing. One of the reasons I love working on this is because I anticipate users will surprise us by doing things with the software that we don’t expect. When we started Flickr it was hard to classify — was it a social network? a platform? a hosting service? blog software? It turned out to be a lot of things we’re still trying to get our heads around.

Blushing crimson
The site you’re seeing is super early stage, though we’ve eschewed the “beta” figleaf. We tried to get as many things right as we could, but we probably got a lot of things wrong. In fact, we’re sure of it. Let us know what we can fix, what’s dumb, baffling and terrible, glaringly obvious things we totally missed. Taste profiles and similarity to other users won’t work really well until there are many more users. Those features will be iffy for a while. We know the topic-adding wizard needs work. There are only 500 topics, and they need grooming like your hipster stache needs grooming. A friend said if you launch something you’re not at all embarrassed by, then you’ve waited too long. We’re blushing, but we’ll keep iterating til it’s great.

Follow the money
The business of Hunch will be referral fees from external sites for the subset of topics that have to do with products and services. Monetization is not really going on now, though we do have some affiliate links to Amazon and others. We’re not marketing things to people that they don’t want, or hoarding and selling people’s data, and of course the presence of a link has no effect on Hunch decision results.

Developers Developers Developers Developers*
There is, of course, an API, which will launch with the full site, so you can, say, write a program that figures out how special you are, or a Facebook Nemesis finder. Maybe someday our data can help people solve the “Napoleon Dynamite” problem ).”””

Here is how Hunch.com is described on the site:

“”””What is Hunch?

Hunch is a decision-making site that gets smarter the more it’s used.

After asking you 10 questions or fewer, Hunch will propose a concrete and customized result for hundreds of decisions of every kind: What kind of car should I buy? Should I switch to a Mac? Should I dump my boyfriend? Where should I go on vacation? Should I get a tattoo?

Hunch uses machine learning to get smarter in two ways:

• User contributions train Hunch to be smarter overall. Contributions can take many forms, from correcting a fact that Hunch got wrong, to suggesting new decision topics to feature, follow-up questions to ask or decision results to propose.
• The more Hunch learns about each individual user’s personality and preferences, the better Hunch can customize decision results for that user. It’s like a friend getting to know someone’s taste and preferences over time, so they can provide sound and trusted advice.

What problem does Hunch solve?

Our long-term goal is for a user to be able to come to Hunch with any decision she is pondering, and after answering a handful of questions, get as good a decision as if she had interviewed a group of knowledgeable people or done hours of careful research online.

Eventually, when Hunch gets good enough, we hope users will trust it to make an informed decision without having to turn to lots of external time-consuming sources of information.

What stage is Hunch in?

Since Hunch is based on harnessing collective knowledge from many users, Hunch really begins today.

Hunch is starting with about 500 decision topics, 5,000 follow-up questions, and more than 30,000 possible decision outcomes. Many of these were contributed by our early preview users over the last few months.

• As more people use Hunch, it will become both smarter about what it knows and broader in the scope of decision topics available.
• For now, users must request a site invitation and create an account to use Hunch. In coming months, this restriction will be removed, and anyone can use Hunch whether they have an account or not.

How will Hunch make money?

• Some of the decision result pages on Hunch link to external sites where users can purchase the product or service that Hunch proposed. If they do, Hunch may earn a referral fee from the merchant.
• The presence of a link to a retailer has no effect on the decision outcomes Hunch proposes. Within a given decision topic, it’s likely that some result pages will link to an online retailer, and others won’t. Some topics don’t have these sorts of links at all.

How is Hunch different from other sites?

• Hunch helps users make decisions of every kind that are customized to them.
• Hunch gets smarter by harnessing the collective knowledge of the entire Hunch community.
• For each decision, Hunch asks a series of structured questions leading to a concrete decision result.

What’s the history of Hunch and who is behind it?

• Hunch Inc. was formed in late 2007 and is based in New York City.
• Hunch has an 11 person team. The core algorithm was built by MIT computer scientists with backgrounds in machine learning. Hunch’s design and product functionality are led by Flickr Co-founder Caterina Fake, who is a Hunch Co-founder and Chief Product Officer.
• Hunch began a small preview period in the Fall of 2008 and opened its preview to the public on March 27, 2009.

Contact for additional questions

Kelly Ford
VP of Marketing
press@hunch.com”’