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.
