Caterina Fake, Hunch’s chief product officer, instigated the weekly game night shortly after she arrived at the Internet startup in June 2008. But on this particular spring night, the whole thing threatens to fall apart. Fake has brought Dominion, a game with such byzantine rules — something to do with monarchs using gold, militias, and witchcraft to seize unclaimed land — that even the MIT-trained engineers struggle to make sense of it. Fake furrows her brow as she studies the rule book. After 20 minutes, it looks like her coworkers are ready to forget the whole thing and head home, but Fake cajoles them into staying just a little longer. “Could somebody turn this music down?” she asks, shooting a glance at the office stereo blaring Girl Talk. “I can’t concentrate.”
WUSSBAGS! Dominion is easy.
Hunch learns about its members through “Teach Hunch About You” questions. These queries can cover anything — exercise regimens, the ethics of SeaWorld, zombies — and the more of them people answer, the more complete a profile Hunch can create. (Since the site launched in June 2009, it has collected 55 million answers to these questions from its 1 million active users.) Once Hunch’s algorithm collects enough data, it can start finding surprising correlations. For instance, people who swat flies have a thing for USA Today. People who believe in alien abductions are more likely than nonbelievers to drink Pepsi. People who eat fresh fruit every day are more likely to desire Canon’s pricey EOS 7D camera. And respondents who cut their sandwiches diagonally rather than vertically are more likely to prefer men’s Ray-Ban sunglassesThis is just like OK Cupid, only with more of a product angle than a human behavior/desire angle. Also, its getting more like Artificial Intellegence ...
But Hunch is arguably the most ambitious social search service. Ultimately, it isn’t just helping people shop for cars — it is getting its users to volunteer a truly impressive amount of unique psychographic data. Just as Google built a vast index of the Web and Facebook constructed a model of our social connections, Hunch is assembling an extraordinarily rich and detailed picture of each user’s taste. From there it can claim to know or extrapolate everything that a person likes or would like. “The ultimate goal of the company is to map every person on the Internet to every object on the Internet, be that a product, a service, or a person,” Fake says.
SKYNET! SKYNETTTTTTT
