Right about now, a lot of us are scratching our heads about what to give people for the holidays. Well, if the person you are looking for uses Twitter a lot, try Hunch’s new Gift-O-Matic. You just plug in their Twitter handle, and Hunch spits out a list of gift suggestions. The Gift-O-Matic is just something a couple Hunch employees threw together to show off the Hunch API (which powers real gift suggestions at Gifts.com based on your Facebook friends). Essentially, Hunch is mapping your social graph to its own taste graph to come up with the recommendations.
So how well does it work? The top suggestion for Hunch CEO Chris Dixon is a railrroad strategy game called Ticket To Ride. He’s always Tweeting about the Carcassonne, so that’s a pretty good suggestion. What to get Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley? How about an iPod-compatible jukebox. Our own MG Siegler, aka @parislemon? The Gift-O-Matic’s top suggestion is a a Star Trek USB Communicator nerd phone. Perfect!
So far, so good. But when I tried @arrington, the man who has everything, I got mixed results. It came up with some pretty decent ones: a voltaic backpack, the Hurt Locker DVD, a large carry-on satchel, and an expert bocce set. But the first suggestion, a book called Wetlands, was a little off. I may be wrong, but I just don’t think he’d enjoy this book. Here is the description:
With more than one million copies sold in Germany and rights snapped up in twenty-seven countries, Wetlands is the sexually and anatomically explicit novel that is changing the conversation about female identity and sexuality around the world
Yeah, I’m definitely getting him the bocce set.
Hunch is a consumer web application that is building the “taste graph” of the internet, mapping every person on the internet to every entity on the internet and their affinity for that entity. An entity could be a web site, a cookbook, a hotel room, a celebrity, a restaurant, etc. Hunch creates a taste profile by asking them a series of questions which range from serious to profound and subsequently can make recommendations personalized to that user, which live in...
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
