Google has a Hunch

I wish there was a video to go along with it, but very interesting none the less.

Kind of off-topic, but I liked this slide: http://cl.ly/3r1F1l141g2g0T3v3929

It's important to realize that there are different types of chicken and egg problems.

OpenTable, Monster and AdWords don't create a sense of community. There's a strict buyer/seller differentiator between the users.

AirBnB and ebay create something in the middle, where many of the sellers are also buyers (especially in the beginning).

Lastly, sites like etsy and dribbble have a strong sense of community because creators are mostly "selling" to their peers.

An interesting exercise is to take a successful company in one of those columns and bring it to another. In one sense that's what AirBnb did by taking the couchsurfing concept and turning it in to a "hybrid" with a stronger buyer/seller differentiator.

Really interesting. This reminds me of OKCupid's correlational questions[1]: If you want to know if your date puts out, ask if they like beer. If you want to know if they're liberal, as if they like complex people in their lives. The idea of building social networks around interests seems so intuitive, yet I've never seen anybody really do it before. Hunch seems to be a smarter StumbleUpon. I'm intrigued.

[1] http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-best-questions-for-fir...