Flickr pioneer plays a Hunch

Caterina Fake has no ambitions to take on Microsoft. It is just a coincidence that her new company, Hunch, opened its doors to the public two weeks after the software giant launched an $80 million marketing campaign to launch a upgraded search engine that encourages people to use the Web to make decisions.

As it happens, this is exactly what Hunch does — only better, according to some reviewers of the online service.

Started last year by a group of computer scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Hunch seeks to combine the insight of large groups of people (often dubbed the "wisdom of the crowd") with a dab of artificial intelligence to provide one right answer to questions about everything from what to buy your dad for Christmas to whether you should fire your cleaning person.

Unlike search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Microsoft's Bing that answer queries with a set of links to other Web sites, Hunch responds with a set of questions designed to guide a user to a single, correct answer.

The idea, said co-founder Chris Dixon, is to model how people make decisions in real life. "If you go and talk to a human expert about something, they will give you a follow-up question," Dixon said.

"It's an interesting play," said Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn. "The biggest question is whether it will help with the discovery of answers. I don't know."

Sure bet

But Hoffman's skepticism doesn't extend to Fake, whom he considers one of the best designers of consumer Web products in the world. Back in 2004, Hoffman wrote a check to invest in Flickr, an online photo site co-founded by Fake, without even seeing a term sheet.

Hoffman said he believed the now-40-year-old art designer and her then-husband, Stewart Butterfield, the other co-founder, had special insight into where the Web was going and what people would want to do online.

Flickr had plenty of competition. But the other sites emphasized printing your photos, which made them money. Flickr emphasized sharing, which built community. Hoffman bet that if Flickr could get sharing right, it would have a huge impact on the future of the Web.

He was right. Yahoo bought Flickr in March 2005 for a reported $30 million, and a massive wave of user-generated content began reshaping the media landscape.

According to comScore, Flickr is the third-most-visited photo-sharing site in the U.S., after Facebook and Photobucket. Yahoo says Flickr currently hosts 3.4 billion photos.

Flickr's growth didn't happen by accident. For weeks after it was launched in early 2004, Fake and other early members of the team personally greeted each user. They commented on users' photos and introduced them to other photographers from their hometowns. "We got to know them," Fake said.

Users also got to know Fake. She shared photos from her vacations and took pictures of the books she was reading. When she got a new banjo, she asked for help with the songs she was learning to play. When her daughter was born in 2007, she shared her baby pictures.

Fake is bringing the same personal touch to Hunch. She met the team behind it last summer, shortly after she resigned from Yahoo, where she had run the technology-development group. Dixon and the other founders asked her advice on designing their service. Fake liked their idea, so she obliged.

But she was determined to keep a distance. "I didn't want to go running off and starting a new company," she said. "That was just madness." By then she was divorced, living in San Francisco and raising her daughter, who was 10 months old.

Hunch sucked her in. From the start, it was clear her advice was indispensable. Dixon and other members of the technology team readily admitted they knew nothing about building a popular consumer product that relies on user participation. By the end of July they had persuaded Fake to join as a co-founder and gave her control of product design. She now splits her time between a small office in San Francisco and New York, where Hunch is based.

Reflection of her

Thanks to her day-to-day involvement, talking to Hunch seems a lot like talking to Fake herself. The service is both serious and playful, smart and frivolous, ready to discuss anything from technology to art.

It makes jokes, including topics like "Are you ready for the zombie apocalypse?" And it treats everyday concerns like "What deodorant should I wear?" with respect. (Fake recently added Tom's of Maine Natural Care Natural Deodorant Stick, Honeysuckle Rose, 2.25 oz. as a suggested result.)

Fake's participation could well be vital.

"One of the real tricks to online communities is that early contributors set the tone," said Jeremy Levine, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, which has invested in Hunch. "If you get it right at the beginning, these communities can attract massive amounts of people."

Hunch is not there yet. Right now the site has only about 75,000 users with accounts. To grow, Hunch must rely on the enthusiasm of strangers, whom it is asking to create and edit topics and to give feedback on results.

But thanks to all the data it collects, Hunch can "make these amazing predictions and give people very satisfying results," Fake said. She describes Hunch as a cross between Yahoo Answers and Wikipedia.

When Hunch has enough data, it "should work like a really awesome Magic 8 Ball on steroids," Fake said.