Hunch: Caterina Fake's New Killer Startup

Tired of using rock, paper, scissors, spock, lizard to make your decisions? Well Caterina Fake's (Flickr co-founder) new startup, Hunch, is coming soon to help you.

At the heart of Hunch are decision trees that allow a human user to go through a series of questions in order to make decisions. Caterina says:

“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. ”Caterina Fake

Read Write Web writes:

“While we know very little about the inner workings of Hunch, it apparently combines decision trees with a fair amount of end user personalization in the form of questions it asks people visiting the site. These questions allow Hunch to form affinities with other users who ask similar questions. On the back end, contributors will be able to create topic areas (called Super Questions) and add questions and results underneath those topics. How much control you will have or how the interface looks for this we aren't sure yet.”

Hunch seems like a brilliant idea but it would take quite some effort and time for it to go mainstream.

Geotagging with where On Earth ID (WOEID) API

Yahoo! has taken the next step in geotagging by providing developers with the ability to easily geo tag their content. Specifically Yahoo! has opened up their geotagging API using which developers can now get real-time WOEID (Where on Earth ID) information.

Flickr is now providing the following WOE API services:
* flickr.places.find
* flickr.places.findByLatLon
* flickr.places.resolvePlaceId
* flickr.places.resolvePlaceURL


Dan Catt of Flickr (Yahoo!) has more regarding WOEIDs on geobloggers.com. In his blog post he points out Flickr photos search by WOEID which allows you to enter WOEID and get all photos that are of that area. He also highlights the differences between Flickr API and Yahoo! geo API:

“Over at Flickr, we only use specific ‘levels’ of geo information, such as city, region, state, country, while the APIs over at Yahoo will spit out far more levels in-between the ones Flickr uses, as well as deeper down to neighborhood levels, which Flickr doesn’t do (yet).”

One thing to note is that WOEID isn't assigned at address level, only at town or neighborhood level.