I have a Hunch that this won't fly yet

Tried out Hunch, the new service from Flickr's founder Caterina Fake. In essence its 20 questions meets Myers Briggs - tries to suss out your personality, and then recommends things like cars, holidays, music you may like based on further decision trees. Now these sorts of tests are viral, every so often one comes along and everyone rushes off and does it. But I'm not sure there is a long term viable business there....unless the aim is to garner user data and sell it on - so picking holidays, music and cars pops up straight away, but there is a bit of a search for favourite philosophers for example.

But this is fine, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people (as P T Barnum noted). However, in the tests I did on Hunch it:

(i) Was very slow in its response times, but I assume that's launch-load

(ii) Was very slow in coming to a decision - 20 questions then N more to tell me which car or holiday I liked.

(iii) Unimpressive conclusions - eg holiday 1st choice for Euro beach holiday with a bit of culture - "Italy"

Now, I am sure if you create an account and go through multiple choice strings, it will get better and better at knowing what I want and (possibly) telling me that x% of others also like Y with X, but my big takeaway from all the User Experience experience of these sort of consumer systems is that they have to get to the point fast as most people can't be bothered to spend the time. Still, it is fascinating to think about how one would architect these sorts of systems.

Techcrunch UK's Mike Butcher reckons it should be integrated with Twitter. I reckon I could get a better answer than "Italy" by asking where I should go for a European beach holiday in 140 characters, and dispense with Hunch altogether.

Still, it is funny to see all the SV Echo Chamber desperately trying to be nice but damning it with not quite so gushing praise.....Search Engine Land, having gone through the same holiday steps (see them all on their blog...) notes this ain't going to fly just yet:

After testing a range of different topics and questions I found the results or answers to be uneven. But the process is very interesting and useful, forcing you to consider priorities or criteria at each stage. Caterina Fake told us that she saw Hunch getting better over time. Matt McGee quotes her in his article saying, “It might take five years for Hunch to reach maturity. Right now, it’s like Wikipedia circa 2002.” As more people contribute and become involved questions will become more refined and improve.

As more people contribute..... now that will be interesting, because some people may just be tempted to take the p*ss (shock ) or game it where there is money involved. Wonder how they will screen that sort of activity? Still, they took $2m so one assumes they have quite a runway yet to try and take off on.

However, by and large, anything consumer-ey that I don't like is usually bound to do well so there is hope