We launched Hunch early this morning (w00t!) and there's already been a ton of great press. Here is some of it:

• Hunch: a real decision engine on Search Engine Land, by Matt McGee
• Hunch: your personal decision maker on Search Engine Land, by Greg Sterling. This is great, there are two different posts, one a descriptive walk-though, another about how it fits into the rest of the "space".
• 'Hunch' Web site will make decisions for you on CNN.com by John D. Sutter
• Hunch Launches, Reinvents How You Make Decisions on Mashable, by Ben Parr
• Caterina Fake's Hunch: "Yahoo Answers Is Not The Answer." on TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld. (It's possible I actually said that, but it sounds bad taken out of context, and is not the main idea or impulse behind Hunch! Makes great copy though.)
• Hunch wants you to give it some ideas on L.A. Times by David Sarno
• Hunch: The Search for Better Search on Business Week by Douglas MacMillan
• Hunch: A Cure for Indecision On MIT Technology Review, by Erica Naone.
• Hunch Answers Questions Based on Your Personality on Lifehacker by Kevin Purdy
• Flickr Co-founder's new Hunch on Wall Street Journal by Andrew Lavallee

• ABC News TechBytes
• I have a Hunch this might work for me on the Post Independent by April Clark
• Seraching for Lunch? Ask Hunch! on New York Observer, by Gillian Reagan

In Vietnam, teenage daughters sold into sex slavery

David Brooks writes about Genius - The Modern View whereby we leave the Romantic view of a genius inspired by divine spark, and take a more prosaic view -- that we learn to be geniuses by effort and application. He mentions two books that have been recently published on this theme, "The Talent Code " by Daniel Coyle; and "Talent Is Overrated " by Geoff Colvin.

I knew it! Sent to me by ArtMusicLife on Twitter, some research on Early birds and night owls, which shows that in the morning both types have the same mental capacities, but towards evening, Night Owls stay more alert:

We've been releasing a bunch of sexy Hunch data via the academic API, which has revealed all kinds of great, and often hilarious, correlations such as the fact that people who are frequently thrown out of bars for rowdy behavior have worn cufflinks during the past several weeks. (You won't be able to get to a bunch of these links unless you're logged into Hunch.)

All the sexy data is a byproduct of the larger goals of Hunch and what we're really trying to do is use this data to help people make better decisions. As my friend Chris said yesterday, doing research online is something that super adept internet users, like us geeks, already know how to do, and is how we have been using the web to do our research since it began. We've trained ourselves to think like a computer and enter in just the right keywords to find what we need. We talked about how incredulous our geek (snob) peers are that so many people use Answers sites like Yahoo Answers (which I worked on) and Mahalo. We talked about how circa 1999 a lot of people publishing weblogs snorted at the idea of using "blogging software" like Blogger or Movable Type -- when we had Perl scripts or BBEdit and ftp why would we need anything else?

Hunch is essentially a tool for experts to help non experts -- and when we say experts, we don't necessarily mean people with Ph.D.s, but more often people who have taken the time to do research. For example, a colleague was researching whether or not he should spend the time and money to register a trademark, how much it cost, what the benefits would be. Once he was done, he could build a Hunch topic and share that research with others. Others who had similar experience with it could add their expertise as well. Hunch is re-indexing information that is already out in the world, and on the web, and putting it in the form of decision trees.

Someday, after the system learns enough about people, it should work like a really awesome Magic 8 ball on steroids and just give you the answer you need. It's not awesome yet, but will, we hope, be awesome in the future. On the Transcapitalist site yesterday, I found a post about a Hunch credit card search that's an early indicator of possible future awesomeness:

We find some of these posted on the site, like this one from the Canon PowerShot SD770IS 10MP Digital Camera Pros/Cons, written by Hunch user Kim Rossi: "Took this to see how accurate it would be. My top result was the camera I actually bought six months ago! Well done, Hunch." Hooray! A lot of the time Hunch still fails, but the more that it gets used, and the more different people we have adding tiny bits of data, the better it will get. We need to stay humble, stick to our knitting and keep improving it. Kaizen!

Another anecdotal success story from a new user, awgraham:

I found something I'd clipped out of a paper copy of Wired: Three Smart Things about Sleeping Late. I have a collection of these kinds of things, to arm myself for confrontations with readers of Poor Richard's Almanac. It's short, so I'll post the entirety of it here:

1. You may need more sleep than you think Research by Henry Ford Hospital Sleep Disorders Center found that people who slept eight hours and then claimed they were "well rested" actually performed better and were more alert if they slept another two hours. That figures. Until the invention of the lightbulb (damn you, Edison!), the average person slumbered 10 hours a night.
2. Night owls are more creative. Artists, writers, and coders typically fire on all cylinders by crashing near dawn and awakening at the crack of noon. In one study, "evening people" almost universally slam-dunked a standardized creativity test. Their early-bird brethren struggled for passing scores.
3. Rising early is stressful. The stress hormone cortisol peaks in your blood around 7 am. So if you get up then, you may experience tension. Grab some extra Zs! You'll wake up feeling less like Bert, more like Ernie.

perendinate: To put off until the day after tomorrow.

We've been busy. Since we launched Hunch, over 4.3 million questions have been answered, counting both THAY questions (Teach Hunch About You) and topic question/answers. This is phenomenal, and gives us a ton of data to work with. In the past, statistical prediction like Amazon's collaborative filtering has usually been for one subject only -- i.e. Netflix will look at the movies you like and recommend other movies. And who hasn't bought a John Grisham novel only to have Amazon recommend *other* John Grisham novels? Um, duh. Cross-topic correlations like Hunch has are likely to be more interesting.

Next week we are planning to give researchers access to our data in what we're calling the "academic" API to distinguish it from the, say, "widget" API, which will be released when the site goes public. It's all anonymous and aggregated data of course. Leave a comment below if you're a researcher who wants in.

Some remarkable correlations have emerged from the data already, some of which we posted on Twitter and on the Hunch blog:

• People who believe that alien abductions are real are more likely to blame Nancy Pelosi for the financial crisis.
• People who have broken a leg like video games such as Madden NFL 09 and NBA 2K9, whereas non-leg-breakers prefer Little Big Planet, Katamari Damacy, Super Mario Galaxy and World of Goo
• One of the best predictors of whether people agree they should switch to a Mac: whether they like to dance. Are PC users less fun? The data has spoken.
• Have you used a fake ID to do something you weren't supposed to? It's OK, we won't hold it against you here at Hunch. Fake ID users are more likely to be happy at startups.

The Facebook vs. Twitter topic brought up more interesting stuff: Facebook people, at parties "interact with many, including strangers" whereas Twitter devotees "Interact with a few, known to them". Facebookers buy shampoo that costs more than $7, Twitterers prefer to spend less on their hair, thank you very much. What else? Facebookers are significantly more likely to have had an alcoholic drink in the past 24 hours. Twitterers seem to be less social than Facebookers. But maybe it's because Twitterers report that they have oily skin -- it's the zits!

Now that we have this data, we can improve the Secret Sauce so that all of Hunch's results are tailored to not only you, but people like you who have entered in only a small amount of data (ie, logged out users). And we can add a bunch of features we've had planned but didn't have the data to implement. We can tell you more about different facets of yourself, and cluster you with other people. We can tell you how much of an outlier you are, or how non-unique. Now things get fun.

Last night I saw one of the most disturbing movies that I've ever seen, We Live in Public by Ondi Timoner, which won the Grand Jury Prize for a US Documentary at Sundance, and which has not yet been released to general viewing.

It's the story of Josh Harris, the founder of what is now Jupiter Communications, who at one time was worth $80 million. He spent a lot of his money launching Pseudo, an online TV network, and throwing extravagant Mondo 2000-era parties in which supermodels clad only in pasties and fake fur short-shorts cavorted with bespectacled geeks in an environment comprised mostly of inflatables, drugs, tin foil and strobe lights. Subsequently, and for millions more dollars, he created Quiet, an underground bunker where dozens of people lived for a month in 1999, replete with an interrogation room, communal shower and hundreds of cameras trained on people defecating, having sex, beating each other up and generally behaving like animals for the sake of the spectacle.

Next, he put himself under surveillance, installing dozens of cameras in the apartment where he lived with his girlfriend Tanya, living his life entirely "in public" with people in the chat rooms telling them what to do, watching their fights, participating in their most intimate moments. The relationship fell apart under the pressure of their strange, dehumanizing circumstances, and Josh's money was lost in the bust. Having lost his money and his mind, Harris retired to an orchard in the country, lived for a while in Ethiopia, tried and failed to start again.

Jason Calacanis, after seeing the film at Sundance, mused on the end of empathy, pointing out that when we start communicating with each other digitally, emotional cues of face-to-face interaction are lost -- including tone, facial expression and the so called "blush response". This leads to bullying, and consequences such as the vicious, sexist death threats against Kathy Sierra, the suicide of Abraham Biggs on Justin.tv while his audience egged him on; and the suicide of Megan Meier after her classmate's mother tortured her using a MySpace profile named "Josh Evans". A suggestion from Jason:

We've started sending out invitations to friends and people who signed up on Hunch. We're going to be launching the full public site in the coming months, but for now -- invitations!

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. Clay Shirky, I've got more cognitive surplus for you!

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. Boldly striking out in new directions, the Brilliant and Noble Heroes of Hunch. 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 ).

It's fun. Thanks for checking it out. Hunch time!

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This was a redesign of the start page I must have done @ May 2004, based on the date in the mockup or screenshot. Just found it on my server!

You'll notice the grey background, which we eventually got rid of. Bit too fond of bgcolor and strokes around them!

People, especially Italians, especially (apparently) the Sienese, are so seeking of kinship and belonging, so clannish and teamclustering, it's awesome, almost an art form:

My (awesome, brilliant) colleague at Hunch, Hugo Liu, has a piece in a Shanghainese journal, Cultural Review, entitled "Small happiness: aesthetic strategies for witting consumers". He's not online right now, otherwise I'd ask him if there's a copy of the whole piece, but I'm intrigued by the excerpt on his site. He says "true happiness becomes substantial when it not only endures, but in fact, creates and flourishes" and "with the wisdom of a well-trained imagination, each passing day we will even recognize new beauties in that which is already before us". He calls this "small" happiness -- happinesses that once you know how to recognize, capture and experience them, accrete, thereby becoming "true" happiness that endures over time.