Hunch Ideas

That's perfect, thanks for the quick reply

Posted at: 6:54PM on Nov. 30, 2010. [ permalink ]

How about Hunch dumping a bunch of results into Hunch? I think this site is awesome but it seems to me there should be more results at this stage of the game, and depending on users to create results might not be the best way to go. Perhaps it could be contracted out to a low wage country like India or even better done via machine through some sort of ontology thingie (do we have a database of everything yet?) or an Cyc-ish type tool.

According to the I'm Not Smarter Than A Room Full Of MIT Types rule, though, this of course has to have occurred to the Hunch team and I am curious why they didn't go this route.

Posted at: 12:43PM on Dec. 1, 2010. [ permalink ]

@nedmondson : dumping is the appropriate term for what you describe.
Imo mass dumping of data (some of which are done by members of the Hunch staff), are mostly cold and meaningless. Mainly because there's no human being, no story behind them. Unless of course the database is of very high quality and manually inspected and cleaned up.
Outsourcing would be meaningful in the sense that it would broaden the Hunch population. So not only white affluent males (correct me if I'm wrong?) but also Indian workers, or e.g. underpaid people at the Mechanical Turk.
I think Hunch already has a lot of quality data, from contributors @Hunch and cleverly pulled in from facebook and twitter accounts. Imho the focus should be more on quality than on quantity, on building a very connected taste graph. Thus more people liking, disliking and favoriting, not more results per se.

Posted at: 9:30AM on Dec. 2, 2010. [ permalink ]

How about some step-by-step instructions? I don't find Hunch intuitive at all.

Posted at: 12:09PM on Dec. 6, 2010. [ permalink ]

@tucsonbuddha - I'd be happy to help you out. A good starting place would be to identify an area in which you need a recommendation or are looking to discover something new (cameras, crime novels, restaurants nearby, places to go on vacation, etc...). Hunch is all about delivering personalized recommendations to users, but the user first has to tell Hunch the area in which they are interested. We call these areas Topics.
So, if I were looking for a recommendation for a new car, I would search for cars in the search box and be taken to the cars topic at: hunch.com/cars
The recommendations you receive are personalized by telling Hunch which cars you like and don't like as well as answering Teach Hunch About You questions on the home page. Doing both of these will improve the accuracy of your results on the site.

For our general help info, see this:
hunch.com/info/about/
hunch.com/help/

and post any questions to the forums for more help.

Posted at: 12:21PM on Dec. 6, 2010. [ permalink ]

Here are some ideas that I have had written down for quite a while

1.The option to reply to a pro or con. I think there needs to be more discussion on the results or topics. When I am searching for a product I like to see people’s discussions on the product.

2.More Badges!!- I know that they can be bad sometime because people work just to get them, but they do keep interest up and they make the experience a lot of fun. People have been begging for them ever since I joined! Some badge ideas that I had were:
a.hidden badges -they are hard to get or are very obscure that people need to do a number of things to get it
b.Special Badges- maybe a one day badge if you get so many banjos on some date you get a badge.
c.Temporary badges- similar to the optimistic and popular badges but maybe topic related. Say I reached 1000 banjos in the just for fun category give me a badge for a week.

3.Since there would be more badges available give us the ability to show and hide our favorites

4.MONEY MAKER- have you guys thought of doing sponsored results to bring in a little cash?

5.Bring back the dashboard or a portion of it. just showing some things that I might like on the home page doesn’t really make me go and explore the website. If anything have a section at the bottom that shows a hot topic that is being commented on. Or people that are adding a lot of results.

6.Make the workshop more fun. Get people back in the workshop! That was a fun thing when the site was adding topics left and right. People would add a topic and 5 or 10 people would comment on it saying either it was stupid or awesome.

7.Bring back the yes or no questions. Even if you guys don’t use the information it is still fun to create some stupid topics to see what people pick.

Posted at: 8:34AM on Dec. 10, 2010. [ permalink ]

@idgetman05-
Loads of good ideas in your post. Many of them have been thrown around the office here before, but its always good to hear from users about the parts of the site they want to see expanded.
The Dashboard is still currently the best way to follow what's new on Hunch and which users are currently the most active. By switching the Dashboard off the homepage, we definitely changed the way users are first introduced to Hunch in a manner that favors those seeking recommendations over those looking to interact with Hunch's community of contributors.
The good news for contributors to the site is that we're currently building a totally new design that immediately brings to the fore what is "hot" on the site and is building in momentum amongst users as well as a totally new way to browse users and your similarity to them. It will provide much more incentive to return to the site frequently and become a tastemaker. While these changes will lead to a decreased emphasis on certain older parts of the site, the feedback we got from the community about increased social interaction, freshness of recommendations, visible activity are the priorities we're holding in building this new system. Can't say too much, but I think it will address a lot of the things you've brought up here. We think users will love it.

Posted at: 11:30AM on Dec. 10, 2010. [ permalink ]

@Jon-

Any ETA on the new changes? doesn't have to be specific. End of this year, begining of next, 3 years (i hope not)?

Thanks for the quick reply!

Posted at: 1:32PM on Dec. 10, 2010. [ permalink ]

How about this? It won't be in 2010 and it won't be in 2012. :-)

Posted at: 1:36PM on Dec. 10, 2010. [ permalink ]