If it seems like Twitter is growing faster and faster each day, that is because it is. ComScore has released its March numbers for the U.S., and it estimates that unique visitors to Twitter.com grew 131 percent between February and March to 9.3 million visitors. No wonder Twitter is more popular than Britney.

Not only did Twitter more than double the number of people that go to its site in a single month, but it accelerated its growth from the 55 percent rate it experienced in February. These numbers do not include international visitors, nor do they include all the usage on desktop and mobile clients, which is significant in Twitter’s case. But it is a useful proxy.

So to just to give a sense of the type of growth Twitter is going through, here is the month-to-month growth in U.S. unique visitors so far this year:

March, 2009: 131%
February, 2009: 55%
January, 2009: 33%

In February, comScore estimated that Twitter.com had worldwide 9.8 million visitors worldwide and 4 million U.S. visitors. If that 41 percent ratio of U.S. visitors to total worldwide visitors still holds (in January it was about the same), it would mean that Twitter.com attracted more than 20 million unique visitors worldwide. ComScore releases international figures later in the month.

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Here is the original:
Boom! Twitter More Than Doubles Unique U.S. Visitors To 9.3 Million In March

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The new requirements for web sites were rushed into legislation after the death of a popular Korean actress, Choi Jin Sil, who was driven to suicide after a series of online rumors and threats. Since people now have to submit their real name when uploading content, the government hopes this will cut down on the problem of cyber-bullying in the country.

Or perhaps that’s just what they want you to believe, say critics. The Korea Times, for example, notes that it’s more likely that the government is simply continuing its crackdown on free speech. Already they have been “repeatedly attacked by bloggers,” the paper reports, “first over the controversial decision to resume U.S. beef imports, and more recently for its ineptitude in economic policies. The watershed moment came in January when police arrested Park Dae-sung, a blogger known more widely as ‘Minerva’ and a frequent critic of the government’s economic polices, on charges of ‘deliberately’ undermining public interest by distributing fraudulent information.”

Google Provides an Alternative Method for Uploads

In response to the new legislation, Google has decided they would rather prevent uploads and comments instead of requiring YouTube users to submit their real names and national ID number – a number similar to the United State’s Social Security Number and yet another requirement of the new law.

“We have a bias in favor of freedom of expression and are committed to openness,” said Lucinda Barlow, a spokeswoman for YouTube in Asia. “It’s very important that if users want to be anonymous that they have that chance.”

Another Google spokesperson, Rachel Whetstone, vice president of Global Communications & Public Affairs at Google, was quoted in The Hankyoreh newspaper as saying  “we concluded in the end that it is impossible to provide benefits to internet users while observing this country’s law because the law does not fall in line with Google’s principles.”

In addition to blocking uploads and comments, Google informed Korean YouTube users via their Korean Google blog that they can change their preference setting to a country other than Korea if they want to continue to upload and comment on videos.

An Easy Way for Google to Look Good?

If Google had implied with the law, it would have represented the first time that the company had ever collected the actual names of internet users.

Still, while many are congratulating Google on taking a stand and protecting freedom of expression on the internet, in this case the company wasn’t really risking that much. That’s because in Korea, Google has a much smaller presence than its domestic counterparts like www.naver.com and www.daum.net. Let’s see how the company behaves in countries where they have a much larger market share.

Image credit: Asiajin

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MySpace has announced that it is planning to launch a new “Editor’s Pick” category in its application directory next week, allowing members to quickly sift through the platform’s best apps. MySpace had previously shown a handful of featured apps as users browsed its Apps Directory, but these rotated and there was no way to browse through them. Now, users will be able to access a stable list of the best apps as determined by a team of MySpace employees who work with the applications on a daily basis (all apps will be chosen by merit, not through paid sponsorships).

MySpace is beginning to accept submissions from developers today, which can be sent in by following these instructions:

If you’d like to be considered for this category, please send an email to developerrelations(at)myspace dot com. Include “Editor’s Pick Category” in the subject line, and provide a reason why you feel your application should be in the spotlight and why your application stands above the rest. Be sure to include the a 200 character description and an 128×128 icon image.

Since social networks began to offer support for third party applications (a trend that began with the launch Facebook Platform in May 2007), one of the biggest issues facing users has been weeding out the best applications from the countless spammy and useless apps available. Last summer Facebook announced that it was going to launch a Verified Apps program that would offer approved applications extra exposure and benefits not afforded to standard apps.

We’re still waiting. In November Facebook announced that it would charge a $375 fee for developers to apply – a fee that we likened to a protection racket. To make matters worse, Facebook is running behind on the program (which was supposed to launch ‘early this year’), and developers are getting antsy.

At this point it’s unclear how similar MySpace’s Editor’s Picks will be to Facebook’s Verified Apps program – the MySpace program is certainly less structured that Facebook’s, and I suspect it won’t be nearly as comprehensive. But it’s still something that lets members know that the applications they’re using can be trusted.

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We were disappointed when a browser script showed us a Magpie redirect behind a shortened link in a Skype testimonial today. Then we used a search on the service BackTweets to find out who else is buying fake Tweets on the service. It’s so revolting and pitiful that it’s kind of sad.

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Each of these companies have more than one campaign running and these are all just from the last 6 hours! Magpie is spewing Tweets through peoples’ accounts all day long. All of the links are obscured by URL shortening service is.gd (hope they are getting a cut!) and the clicker ends up on the advertiser site. Clearly disclosure isn’t mandatory; but even if it was this is just creepy, is it not?

Update: As a number of commenters and at least one of these companies have pointed out, it’s not the companies themselves buying these ads – it’s most likely outside affiliates. So direct your frustration to whoever is in charge of affiliate programs at these companies, not in house ad buyers.

Apple

We thought Apple was able to secure enough mind control with its design prowess that it didn’t have to pay for it! We presume that when most of these people say they bought one of these devices recently, they are flatly lying. Apple is paying them to lie like a robot to their friends on Twitter. Nice.

Skype

We especially like that one of the users here is named “High and Noble.” Uh, yeah.

Cisco’s Flip

The company that makes those Flip cameras just got bought by Cisco for almost $600 million dollars – because everyone loves the Flip.

Box.net

We know and like the people at online storage company Box.net. Their CEO didn’t respond to our inquiry about the use of Magpie, but we’ll give him a hard time about it next time we see him. The last user in this picture is an account that just aggregates other peoples’ Tweets about farting – and then throws in Magpie ads. Classy all around!

StubHub

Ok, so StubHub might not be the kind of company you’d be shocked to find out participates in this kind of thing, but the informal language and appeals to family in this one struck us.

FatCow

Ok, we don’t know FatCow Web Hosting from a hole in the wall but the language here again is really remarkable. Dear FatCow “fans”: you are allowing yourself to be turned into a lying robot zombie for a few dollars a month! Have you no shame?

So there’s the Twitter-sphere for you! Bring on “real time search,” bring on a globally connected community, bring on vapid, vile, stupid shilling. It all seems pretty sad to me. And to the advertisers out there – is this cynical scheme the best you can do to engage with all the new ways people are communicating online? That’s pretty bad.

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis and Phil Glockner. We won’t try to sneakily sell you anything!

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Twitter has been regularly featured on a number of television shows for some time now (I’ve always found CNN’s anchors to be a bit too enamored of the service), but this looks like the first time it’s been featured prominently in a commercial. As Biz Stone writes in the Twitter blog Sprint has just released a new ad called “What’s Happening”, during which an announcer spouts off a number of totally made-up statistics describing how people are using the Sprint network.

Nestled in the middle of the ad, the commercial’s speaker states “233,000 people just Twittered on Twitter. 26% of you viewing this have no idea what that means” as a few dozen 3D blue Twitter birds fly around. I think the 26% figure is on the low side (many people who hear about Twitter every day still have no idea what it really means, and some people who have actually used the service still don’t really get it). But those 3D birds sure look cool.

Oh, and that phone shown at the end? That’s a Palm Pre.

Unfortunately Twitter doesn’t seem to be coping too well with its growth at the moment. The service was well known for its shoddy performance during the first half of 2008, but it has become quite stable since then (coping admirably with such large events as the Election). But in the last two days it has been reverting to its old ways – yesterday users noticed as they lost avatars and messages, which brought the service down for about an hour. This morning more issues are popping up with delayed tweets and errors. This is one of the first times that Twitter has really faced extended issues since it really started approaching the mainstream.

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Despite China’s massively growing internet market, international giants like Google and Facebook are having trouble making gains with the 300 million Chinese online users. China’s netizens are on average very young – 66.7 % of them are younger than 29 years old and 35.2 % of them are teenagers—with social networking and entertainment applications being the most popular.

While companies like Facebook struggle to conquer market share in China and to create viable business models everywhere, their Chinese clones have built lucrative cash machines literally earning billions of dollars a year. Unfortunately, adopting Chinese methods may not help American social networks due both to cultural differences in Chinese user behavior and industry practices. Below is our analysis of the Chinese social networking scene.

Chinese Social Networking is Dominated by Local Players

Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) have long played the dominating role in Chinese Internet life and still continue to be one of the most popular online platforms for social interaction. Registered user accounts, which are mostly anonymous, surpass 3 billion (users have multiple accounts) and 80% of Chinese sites run their own BBS. However in the last year social networking services, most of which require real name registrations, have shown explosive growth in China with 19.3% of netizens using them regularly.

Despite the popularity of social networking in China, the social networking market is dominated by local Chinese players, and Western networks have trouble adapting to Chinese culture and user expectations. Facebook does not rank among the top 15 asocial networks in China while MySpace has only 6 million users (vs. the goal of 50 million users after 2 years initially proclaimed by Rupert Murdoch).

Meanwhile, China’s leading social network Qzone, which is targeted at teenagers, may even be the largest in the world. Tencent, Inc., the company that runs Qzone, recently announced group revenues of over $1 billion in 2008.

As ad sales slump in the recession, only approximately 12% of Qzone’s revenue stems from online advertising with the rest coming from virtual item sales such as applications and avatars. Internet ad spending in China is expected to reach $1.7 billion in 2009, which is about 4% of total ad spend. In comparison, the US is estimated to spend $25.7 billion reaching consumers online through advertising. These comparably low online budgets in China are largely spent at four large news portals, which earn the majority of online ad revenue. This forces most “smaller” portals to find more innovative ways to monetize their traffic.

51.com, which targets working class adults from rural parts of China, is the second most popular social network in China with 130 million registered users. Concurrently, Chinese students flock to Xiaonei with approx. 40 million users. It is backed up with $430 million in funding from its parent company Oak Pacific Interactive and investors like Softbank. Kaixin001, which skyrocketed out of nowhere to 30 million registered users from the middle of last year, targets white collar workers in China’s largest cities by employing controversial invitation techniques and copying apps directly from Facebook.

Yet the astronomical growth of China’s social networks can be attributed as much to its massive market size as to its cultural norms and values. Social networking apps can hit hyper-viral levels in China due to a higher tolerance of intrusive app invitations. It is not uncommon for apps to essentially force new users to invite people and perform tasks before being able to join their friends online. Once friends have joined they are required to interact much more with the apps and advertisements than on Western applications. While this model is not replicable for the US market, certain aspects of this strategy/cultural mindset are necessary if companies like Facebook or Myspace want to compete in China.

Open Social Networks are Not So Open in China

In the middle of 2008, Myspace was the only social network to support OpenSocial in China. Despite Google’s effort, the adoption of OpenSocial was slow among the major social networks. Eventually, other platforms caved into the partnership with Google and gave half-hearted support to OpenSocial. Apart from some of the large social networks mentioned previously this included City!N, Yiqi.com as well as the business network Tianji and BBS Tianya. Other social networks such as Douban, Hainei or news portal Sohu had originally announced to join OpenSocial but then never implemented it, choosing an F8 style API instead. Today, only one of the top 50 apps in China’s social networks runs on OpenSocial despite the hard work put in by the Google team in China.

When Xiaonei and 51.com at first opened their own platforms, their terms of services outraged the developer community with clauses that practically blocked all monetization opportunities and a shared user base with their own websites. The developers launched several public protests against the social networks including the website www.anti-opensocial.com to rebel against hypocritical support for these “fake open” platforms. The executives from these social networks did respond quickly to the developers demands and changed the terms of service to more reasonable terms, allowing limited monetization opportunities for the developers.

Unfortunately, most social networks continue to ignore “Open Social” practices, opting for the more familiar “Guanxi paradigm” in business practices with third parties. The term ”Guānxi” describes the basic dynamic of gaining influence and receiving favors within social relationships, and is a central concept in Chinese society. For social networks, this means that rather than developing an open ecosystem, they focus on dealing with third parties individually and face to face. New Open Social Networking platforms (or better put, “selectively opened”) such as Yahoo’s Guanxi, Tencent’s Xiaoyou and Tianya court established third party app developers like Five Minutes while largely ignoring the wider developer community.

Additionally, ad sales are also strictly controlled by the social networks themselves even though 51.com set a threshold of a $35k fee to be paid for app developers to operate their own ad revenue -based applications (which until now no developer was willing to pay).

Keso, China’s most widely read tech blogger, who we asked to contribute to this article through China’s online expert panel BloggerInsight, summed up the situation by saying “Despite an open platform strategy, Chinese SNS are still competing with each other on the application level”.

Imitation of Facebook was only a Launching Point

Chinese sites are notorious for their C2C strategy, or “Copy to China”. This applies to the app market in the same way as it did to the social networks and all other Web 2.0 and eCommerce services. A year after Facebook introduced the F8 open platform, Xiaonei.com followed suit and announced its open platform in July 2008. The developer group xCube on Xiaonei attracted individuals and companies interested in third-party apps. Yet Chinese outsourcing developers such as Apptz and Ismole armed with experience working on Facebook applications made significant inroads by launching several apps and attracting millions of users in just a few short months.

At about the same time, the apps space also felt the power of C2C with copies of popular apps on Facebook such as “Friends for Sale” and “Parking War” popping up on just about every social network in China. Other leading social networks such as 51.com and Comsenz!’s Ucenter Home (similar to Ning.com) launched their own open platform soon after Xiaonei’s effort.

Chinas 51.com first social network in the world to open up payment API

While Chinese social networks started out as mere clones of existing sites, they’ve managed to innovate the business models to create a very lucrative market by cementing the relationship between application developers and the site’s user base. Happy Farm, the most popular app in China reportedly collects well over $75k a month through installations on various platforms, and according to Chinese application tracker, Appleap, the value of the total social network’s apps install base is approx. $4.5 million.

Opening up the payment system was one of the most anticipated announcements from Facebook’s developer conference F8 2008 but the company failed to create an integrated ecosystem for users to buy and sell apps. China’s socail networks took the great leap forward in this area when 51.com became the first social network in the world opening up its payment system to third party developers in 2008. Users pay money to 51.com and receive virtual coins which they can then again spend on third party applications. The revenue is split 50/50 between the social network and the developer.

Facebook on the other hand currently does not offer developers access to its payment system. If a third party application redirects Facebook users to their own website and payment processor, they usually lose the advantage of Facebook’s trusted brand name and the majority of potential revenues.

At the same time, companies like Becomedia are cooperating with 51.com to bring OfferPal-style cost-per-click/cost-per-action (CPS/CPA) for virtual currency models to China. CPS/CPA is one of the fastest growing sectors of Internet ads in China. This means revenues for the developers by trading their virtual currency for hard cash.

Season Xu from Five Minutes, the maker of China’s most popular app, confirmed the three basic revenue models for apps in China: shared ad revenues, income through virtual currencies, and customized development for branded applications. However he and Herock, a leading figure in the Chinese tech blogosphere whom we also spoke to, expect a consolidation in the app development market soon with larger companies taking over and benefiting from effects of scale, rather than individual developers still being able to produce top apps.

What can Facebook and Western social networks learn, if anything?

If monetizing a social network is so easy, then why hasn’t Facebook opened up its payment API to third party developers? While the aggressive and intrusive hyper-viral aspects of the apps in China may not be replicable in a Western Market, the problems for creating a more viable business model run deeper. Western companies cannot innovate in the same way due to institutional problems stemming from their own struggle for an identity and revenue.

Facebook has just recently announced a “credits” system, but it seems to miss the mark. The new system demonstrates little incentive for users to shell over money, and does not speak to the same need as paying for a social application that all your friends are already on and talking about. Facebook may be afraid to become a marketplace for applications, because they are reluctant to be labeled as a social gaming network or a social app store. Instead, they are a self-styled guru of dynamic human interaction. If they opened up their platform to become an apps store, their major revenue streams would put them into a pigeonhole, calling their $15 billion valuation into question. They obviously don’t want to be labeled as a “gaming platform” either, and don’t want to fully depend on selling digital trinkets.

Like during the American gold rush in 1849, where Chinese merchants prospered while most prospectors went bust in search of striking gold, it appears that building viable, scalable businesses for Social Networking sites may still be an ancient Chinese secret for Westerners.

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Twitter turned down an offer to be bought by Facebook just a few months ago for half a billion dollars, although that was based partially on overvalued Facebook stock. Google would be paying in cash and/or publicly valued stock, which is equivalent to cash. So whatever the final acquisition value might be, it can’t be compared apples-to-apples with the Facebook deal.

Why would Google want Twitter? We’ve been arguing for some time that Twitter’s real value is in search. It holds the keys to the best real time database and search engine on the Internet, and Google doesn’t even have a horse in the game. In a post last month called It’s Time To Start Thinking Of Twitter As A Search Engine, I wrote:

More and more people are starting to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time as they interact with them. And those brands want to know all about it, whether to respond individually (The W Hotel pestered me until I told them to just leave me alone), or simply gather the information to see what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.

And all of it is discoverable at search.twitter.com, the search engine that Twitter acquired last summer.

People searching for news. Brands searching for feedback. That’s valuable stuff.

Twitter knows it, too. They’re going to build their business model on it. Forget small time payments from users for pro accounts and other features, all they have to do is keep growing the base and gather more and more of those emotional grunts. In aggregate it’s extremely valuable. And as Google has shown, search is vastly monetizable – somewhere around 40% of all online advertising revenue goes to ads on search listings today.

If this is accurate, it’s a brilliant deal for Google – the value of Twitter is only going to go up over time. And it will be Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s second sale to Goolge – they sold Blogger to them just five years ago. But there’s one big question – where’s Microsoft in all this? Letting Twitter go to Google only hurts them, badly, in the long term search game. This is an asset they need to be competing for aggressively.

Of course, it’ll be sad to see Twitter become just another subsidiary of Google, if this happens. I would have liked to have seen the company spread its wings a little longer to see what it could do.

Updated: Yet another source says the acquisition discussions are still fairly early stage, and the two companies are also considering working together on a Google real time search engine.

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Tracking Social Updates with Nomee

The way that Nomee’s CEO Kevin Mokarow describes his new Adobe AIR application is that it lets you follow “people, not web sites.” This is accomplished through the creation and exchange of “Nomee cards.” In your card, you enter in your contact information and your social networking profiles from sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and hundreds more – anything with an RSS feed is supported. By creating Nomee cards for select groups, you can specify who gets to see what information. For example, if you want to share your card by posting it to your blog, you may want to include your Twitter, FriendFeed, and MySpace information, but not your Facebook profile. For your close friends, however, you could share a separate Nomee card which contains your Facebook profile info, too.

Nomee also provides pre-built cards for certain high-profile persons including celebrities, sports players, and the occasional politician (yes, it’s Barack Obama). Anyone can subscribe to these cards just as anyone can subscribe to yours – and you don’t have to reciprocate by accepting their card in return. It’s entirely a one way experience.

Within the Nomee application the cards can be organized into groups and clicking on any user’s information will display the number of updates per service in a very iPhone-esque fashion. You can also view a stream of that person’s most recent updates across all their networks.

Some Issues

Obviously, keeping track of all your friends and colleagues in Nomee could be very inefficient since you have to click on users one-by-one to see their respective streams. The only other option for seeing friends’ updates is turning on the desktop alerts – a feature you’ll either love or hate. If you only have a few contacts, it may be nice to get the occasional pop-up, but most of us would be overrun with alerts.

The company intended this application to be a way to stay tuned into what your friends and other contacts are up to, but outside of those pop-ups, its interface makes this relatively time-consuming and inefficient. However, in playing with the application ourselves, we saw the potential for it to become a social address book. Of course, transforming the app from a stream-based aggregator to an address book would require some additional work on the company’s part.

Still, the idea is intriguing – an address book that’s filled not only with traditional contact info, but also with the status updates and other social data produced by that contact across the social networking arena. That could actually be a useful desktop application. Add a mobile sync feature and there could really be something there.

In order for this to come to pass, though, Nomee would have to add a lot more features. For example, it would have to allow you to build contacts on your own and it should let you accept vCards from others which you could then customize by entering in things like their Twitter username, etc. Supporting a standard like vCard is important because you can’t assume that everyone is going to be creating these “Nomee cards.”

At the moment, Nomee is somewhere in between web-based aggregation portals like FriendFeed (or, these days, Facebook’s stream) and desktop-based AIR apps like TweetDeck’s Twitter-tracking tool. The company needs to decide how committed they are to being an aggregation tool versus a social contact organizer. If it’s the former, the current iteration somewhat fails for anyone with a decent amount of contacts to follow because it’s just inefficient to track updates with this app. But if it’s the latter, after some work Nomee could become a useful way to pull up contact information while also seeing a person’s latest social activity.

We suppose that, to a point, you can use Nomee in this way right now. However, you’re restricted to those who already have Nomee cards – which includes very few “real” people at the moment. (All you have are celebrity “news makers.”) And without real people to follow, there isn’t much you can do with a social application.

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Twitter co-founder Biz Stone sent out an Email earlier this afternoon to a number of users who had previously enabled ‘autofollowing’, stating that the company is planning to shut the feature down. ‘Autofollowing’ allows users to automatically reciprocate whenever another Twitter user follows them. The feature has never been widely available to the public (at least not through Twitter’s site), and was only enabled by sending a request to Twitter support.

While Stone ackowledges that the autofollow feature does have some uses (such as for applications built on the Twitter API or simply to be polite), generally speaking most of these autofollows are disingenuous. Many of the more popular Twitter users who have autofollow enabled are now following tweets from thousands of people at a time, the vast majority of which they clearly aren’t paying attention to.

This is probably a good move on Twitter’s part, as I’ve always found the practice to be pretty spammy. Of course, there are still a number of third party services that help users accomplish the same thing. What remains to be seen is if Twitter will try to disable these third party services, or if it simply doesn’t want to be officially condoning the practice.

Below is the letter in its entirety:

Hi There,

I’m contacting you because you have a Twitter account for which
we enabled something called “autofollow.” This is not a public
feature, it’s something we did for a limited set of accounts
such that they automatically follow any account that follows
them.

We’re going to discontinue autofollow because this behavior
sends the wrong message. Namely, it is unlikely that anyone can
actually read tweets from thousands of accounts which makes
this activity disingenuous.

However, we understand that there may be exceptions such as
applications built using our API or the ability to exchange
direct messages. There are also some who think it’s simply
polite to follow back other accounts.

While we’re going to stop supporting autofollow, we’d like to
find a way to support the other goals folks are really trying
to accomplish. Please feel free to reply to this email and let
us know how we can do this better together.

Thanks,
Biz Stone, Co-founder
Twitter, Inc.

Thanks to Kent Nichols for the tip.

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The new project aims to become a site that can help anyone make a decision about anything. The way it will do this is through the application of decision trees that are created by contributing users. Using decision trees in expert systems is nothing new, but applying that idea to a crowdsourcing model might possibly be a stroke of genius. Think Aardvark meets Wikipedia and you start to get the idea.

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Hunch is still in closed beta, but is accepting requests for invites. We’re thinking you will want to sign up, though, after you hear what Caterina says about it:

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.

She adds that a lot of content in Hunch is going to be generated by its user base. Do you know the right questions to ask to help someone pick out the right pair of shoes for hiking, or what cell phone to buy? With Hunch, you will be able to get in on the ground floor and know that your contributions will help many people get the right answer to their question.

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.

Caterina also says that there is room for the site to make money, by including Super Question areas that are affiliated with commercial products or services, but that part is not being rushed as they want to get the core functionality working just right.

We think the potential for the idea behind Hunch is huge. If you look at another very famous crowdsourced project, Wikipedia, and combine that with the sheer utility of the application Aardvark (which lets you pose questions to an extensive network of Aardvark-managed instant messaging contacts; our review here), the sky really is the limit for how much this tool can grow in usefulness and popularity.

Self-titled photo courtesy of Caterina Fake on Flickr.

Discuss