Hunch

41st Best Stand up Stew­art Lee sug­ges­ted dur­ing his recent BBC pro­gram that once upon a time in his­tory a man who could lay claim to hav­ing read all the books in the world would be con­sidered to be extremely intel­li­gent. This fact is hard to dis­pute. How­ever, it’s equally hard to dis­pute the fol­low­ing point he put forth — that a man who could claim to have read all the books avail­able today could be con­sidered to be per­haps the stu­pid­est man alive.

The idea I took from this is the per­haps con­tro­ver­sial phrase “all of us are not as smart as one of us”.

This is a com­mon idea on the inter­net — that there more people there are on it, the worse it actu­ally gets — and has been wit­nessed first hand through the mass move­ments of people from one social net­work­ing site to another. Myspace for instance, once the happy home of every­one every­where was aban­doned for bebo at the point where it launched Lilly Allen’s career and every other ass with a gui­tar decided to net­work them­selves to per­fect strangers. Bebo was aban­doned for Face­book when every­one we hated ended up there. Face­book has been aban­doned for Twit­ter by idiots.

Basic­ally as soon as every­one knows about a site and joins up to it it’s poten­tial use­ful­ness, fun and even­tu­ally cred­ib­il­ity is des­troyed. For an example of this just look at Trent Reznor and Ashton Kutcher’s per­sonal use of Twit­ter to trum­pet noth­ing other than their own egos and how this might effect a per­sons decision to use it,

So where then does this leave Hunch the new site which offers you your very own web based decision mak­ing robot?

Launched from closed beta yes­ter­day, Hunch is a site that recom­mends you stuff and helps you make up your mind about really tricky ques­tions. You can also recom­mend your own ideas to the vari­ous top­ics up for dis­cus­sion to improve res­ults for other people. A recent blog post nicely sums up it’s ambi­tion and ethos:

For those of you who are new, Hunch helps you make decisions, and gives you res­ults it wouldn’t give other people, get­ting smarter over time as more people use it. We would like it very much if you would like it. We like it! So very much!

What a won­der­ful idea…

And I mean that without a trace of sar­casm. I like ideas like this. A lot. The inter­net can be an irrit­at­ing place filled with ter­rible blow hards who want noth­ing more than to tell you how good some­thing is when it is clearly not. It’s nice that there’s a place to go that aims to per­son­ally tailor the recom­mend­a­tions and help it gives you.

It’s nice that there’s a place like that just now. Hunch right now car­ries the smell of the early adop­ter. Of unspoiled vir­gin lawn ten­ded by the caring beta test­ers. It’s a lot of fun right now — as is being involved in any­thing from as close to the ground as possible.

It’s just that I can’t vouch for it in a week or a month and espe­cially not in a year. Not once it’s been found by the dreaded gen­eral public.

Hope­fully the Hunch team are aware of how stu­pid we all are together. Hope­fully the mech­an­ism by which the site tail­ors recom­mend­a­tions on a per­son to per­son basis is put together dynam­ic­ally enough to with­stand the incom­ing flux of gen­eral retard­a­tion amassed within the group con­scious­ness of the inter­net. Hope­fully Hunch doesn’t learn stu­pid­ity from us.

In this light my recom­mend­a­tion to you is to get over there right now and give it a go before the mor­ons find it.